Thank you for your interest in contributing to the project! This resource collects the advice and experience of journalists, newsroom developers, and security experts, organized into a set of lessons and training materials available for newsroom staff who find themselves leading security trainings. In a moment when reporters are asking how to protect themselves and their sources, we want to see more people armed to answer those questions and help newsrooms communicate and store data more securely.
The Field Guide is a collaborative project. It gets better every time anyone from the journalism, tech, and security communities shares advice, writes up an experience, asks a question, or even just spots a typo. We'd love to add your voice to this project.
This project actively encourages contributions from people of all genders and statuses, races, ethnicities, ages, creeds, nationalities, persuasions, alignments, sizes, shapes, and journalistic affiliations. You are welcome here. By participating in this project, you are agreeing to abide by its code of conduct. Please report unacceptable behaviour to [email protected]
The project benefits from contributors of all skill levels and backgrounds. Sharing a resource that helped you understand something for the first time is awesome. Telling everyone about a training game your colleagues loved is awesome, too. And so is just asking a question, as you think about how your newsroom can better protect its journalists and sources.
If you're wondering what you might be able to offer this project, here are a few questions to get you started:
- Could you read through a lesson plan and tell us what seems helpful and what's confusing?
- Could you write up a case study about a security situation you've run into?
- Could you describe the cultural roadblocks you've run into trying to bring more security to your newsroom, and how you've pushed through them?
- Could you help add checklists at the ends of lessons?
- Could you describe how security needs might be different in different countries, or work on translating documentation into another language?
Even just adding a quick link or two is a great way to contribute. If you've got a timely article or an old favorite that really captures the value of taking a lesson seriously, those add fantastic context. We don't want to duplicate work that other people have done better already, and we recognize that this is just one of many great resources. So if you know of a great lesson plan or walkthrough somewhere else, there's a section in each lesson for links, and our resource guide is an excellent spot for links that don't fit a specific lesson. Share your favorites.
And one more way to help us make this project even better:
- Try out one of these lesson plans and let us know how it goes!
More than anything, we want this curriculum to be useful to people as they help their colleagues get better at security. We'd love to hear how well these lessons work in your newsroom, and what we can do to improve them.
The latest version of the field guide is available at https://securitytraining.opennews.org/en/latest/. You can read it there, or download ePub or PDF versions for offline reading. The source code for the field guide lives in Github, at https://github.com/OpenNewsLabs/newsroom-security-curricula, where we love to see comments, issues, and pull requests. If you're interested in contributing but you're not sure where to start, we have a list of open issues - pick one and dive in!
Have you used The Field Guide to Security Training in the Newsroom to lead a workshop in your newsroom? We'd love to hear about it. You can reach us via email at [email protected]. Project maintainers can also be found in the security channel of the NewsNerdery Slack team.
If you'd like to submit a new lesson plan to this guidebook, first of all, thank you! Please start by opening an issue. If you're comfortable with Github and Markdown, the best way to submit changes is to fork this project and open a pull request. If git is not your thing, you can write your lesson plans in your editor of choice and send them to us at [email protected]. You'll find Markdown and HTML lesson plan templates in the project's templates directory.
Chapter 3 includes a glossary and links to existing security resources, to complement and extend the topics covered in our lesson plans. If your favourite links are missing, we'd love to add them! If you're comfortable with GitHub, we welcome pull requests and new issues, or you can also drop us an email anytime.
The initial version of the guide was written with North American English-speaking newsrooms in mind, but digital security is important for journalists working in all communities and languages. If you can provide translations of the existing guide resources, or if you'd like to add lesson plans covering topics more relevant to your community, please contact us.
If you see something that looks wrong in the guide, from simple typos to out-dated or questionable security advice, please let us know. In most cases, the best way to bring it to our attention is by opening an issue. We can also be reached via email at [email protected].