Open source journalism: The Gotham Gazette's budget games

Gail Robinson, editor in chief of the Gotham Gazette, and Amanda Hickman are two of my new journalism heroes. With a Knight Foundation grant, they’ve been creating a series of news games, which they’re in the process of open sourcing. Switch is kind of a basic game that has players pick cards at random until they can successfully match them, Memory-style.

Balance!, however, is a bit more interesting: It lets players try to balance NYC’s ominous budget through the downturn, and compare their results with Mayor Bloomberg’s. Users can then submit their budgets, providing a quick, graphical way to understand the sacrifices being made, and outlining some of the basic challenges with cutting each area. The Flash game is open source and available on Git Hub, and Amanda’s promised that other journalism games will also be posted there in the future.