Conrad Fox

Newsgriddle was the backend database I created to track the output of several large, international reporting projects between 2014 and 2018. The projects, run by the non-profit Round Earth Media, paired US reporters with counterparts in the countries they were reporting from. The reporters worked together in the field as equals but published in their own languages in their respective countries. My job was to recruit and mentor the local reporters, find partner outlets in their countries, generate story ideas, interview initial sources, make sure the reporters were safe and accounted for while in the field, and edit their work to an international standard once they returned.

There were always many different teams at different stages of production, and any single assignment could lead to published pieces in several different languages. Thus I created Newsgriddle, a kind of Basecamp® for journalism to put all the information into one place and allow us to tabulate our production as we went along. The system is built on the Django framework. The page you are reading is a readonly view into the main models for the data. The frontend websites for each project, which I also created, are built on a separate Wagtail app which filters the data by project. You can read about my experience combining Wagtail and vanilla Django on my blog.