Charles Apple

We reported the other day about a free meetup this coming Monday night in Boston sponsored by the Society for News Design.

If you’re in the Boston metro area, reserve Tuesday night, July 20, as well. This one, too, sounds like a real winner for visual journalists.

Matt Carroll of the Boston Globe writes:

There’s a new group called Hacks/Hackers, which is aimed at journalists interested in learning more about digital and technologists interested in media. (There are chapters in New York and San Francisco, too.)

We’re holding our first meeting: “Timeless: Tools for helping reporters create a visual timeline”

Speakers: Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, creators of the Many-eyes.com data visualization site.

Also: Austin Gardner-Smith, of Pinyadda.come, a web application designed to make it easy to gather, customize, and share news and information from across the web.

When: Tuesday, July 20. [Drinks and munchies are served from 6 p.m to 7; the talks begin at 7]

Where: Microsoft NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

The closest MTA station would be the Red Line’s Kendall/MIT stop.

Charge: A $10 contribution (or what you can afford) is requested for food and drinks. Students free.

Find more information about the event here.

The Boston chapter of Hacks/Hackers held its first social meetup last month. Read about that here.

Matt is hoping to get the word out on this. Please feel free to the news along.

Read more here about the free SND meetup planned for Monday [July 12] in Boston.

Ernie Smith — of the Washington Post’s Express tab and creator of the fabulous Short Form Blog — has found a new interface with Getty Images. But the chewy goodness works only with the iPad.

He writes:

This is a killer app for creative people and photo editors. It’s significantly easier to use than the front end for Getty.

Ernie writes:

I used it tonight. I’m going to use it at work tomorrow.

It’s good enough that every large newspaper should have an iPad just for this.

Read more about it here.

Veteran copy editing guru John McIntyre — who recently returned to a leadership position at the Baltimore Sun nearly a year after being laid off — has found great life lessons hidden in the  learning curve of the Sun’s new CCI system.

John posted Thursday:

Attempting to master the CCI NewsGate programming recently installed at The Sun has left me feeling a perfect prat. I have bungled a number of elementary tasks, have had to have common procedures explained to me repeatedly, and have very nearly gotten disastrously wrong information into print.

If you are interested in learning humility, I recommend editing. It is, first of all, largely anonymous. (Quick, name the five most famous editors in history. Uh-huh, I thought so.) Second, though you may feel some temporary glow of superiority over identifying other people’s mistakes (there’s no a in misled if you mean the past tense), your own errors will be thrown into high relief. Third, when you wind up with people half your age patiently explaining things to you …

Read the entire post here.

I posted last month that John had returned to the Sun. What I failed to mention, however, was that John’s wonderful language-and-editing blog — which he had continued on an outside site during his exile from the Sun — has returned to the Sun’s web site. Please delete your current John McIntyre blog links and bookmark this new one. Which, in fact, is the original blog site where his posts are archived going back to December 2005.