This is an effort to create acceptable social media cards in a smarter, automated way. It's an outgrowth from the AutomatingVisuals team. The impetus for the effort, and some of the findings, are discussed in this blog post, and you can read more about our process here. The program is tentatively called Euchre, pronounced you-KERR.
This project is part of the 2022 JournalismAI Fellowship Programme. The Fellowship brought together 46 journalists and technologists from across the world to collaboratively explore innovative solutions to improve journalism via the use of AI technologies. You can explore all the Fellowship projects at this link.
The project was developed as a collaboration between The McClatchy Co. and Gannett Co. Inc. The fellows who contributed to the project are
- Theresa Poulson, Senior Product Manager, McClatchy (US)
- Tyler Dukes, Investigative Reporter, McClatchy (US)
- Sean Smith, Product Manager, Gannett / USA TODAY Network (US)
- Mike Stucka, National Data Solutions Editor, Gannett / USA TODAY Network (US)
Other credits are listed below.
- Download or clone the repo.
- Change into the directory.
- Ensure you have a working copy of Python.
- Run pip install -r requirements.txt
To launch Euchre, run flask run or python app.py -- either should be fine. It should show a message in the console that includes something like Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000
For the web interface, copy-paste that address into your web browser, or more simply, try typing localhost:5000 into your browser's address bar.
This should bring you to the program's web interface.
Once running, Euchre can be used with HTTP GET or POST requests and all relevant options to generate social media cards automatically. Generate the cards with a call to the base address plus /generate/ with all of the necessary options as part of your payload.
In the interim, you can figure out what the options are and how they're sent by checking the source code to the web interface.
Probably not. Pull requests are welcome if you see something to improve, but the potential of this effort is limited. If you need something potentially more flexible, Thomas Wilburn identified Vercel's OG Image Generation as something potentially worth a look.
Details are available in the LICENSE file. Euchre's core is released under an MIT license, but is built atop things supplied with a GPL license and an Open Font License.
Euchre is a card game that may be most known to people in America's midwest.
It's a trump game with some unusual rules. For example, if spades is chosen as the trump suit, the highest cards become the jack of spades, the jack of clubs, the ace of spaces, then the king of spades.
In other words, Euchre is a way to do weird things with cards.
The general workflow for this project was pioneered by Gannett's Jody Doherty-Cove.
This was done under the auspices of the JournalismAI Fellowship 2022, with particular support from Mattia Peretti and Lakshmi Sivadas. Euchre lessons were provided decades ago particularly by Mark Perry and Joe Finnegan.
JournalismAI is a project of Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science – and it's sponsored by the Google News Initiative. If you want to know more about the Fellowship and the other JournalismAI activities, sign up for the newsletter or get in touch with the team via [email protected]
We received helpful guidance from kind people both inside and outside of our organizations, who gave critical insights from their areas of expertise. Those people included:
- David Caswell, executive product manager, BBC News Labs
- Henning Johannesson, chief product officer, United Robots
- Gabby McCall, senior graphic designer, McClatchy
- Scott Sharpe, visual editor, The (Raleigh) News & Observer
- Chris Amico, developer, USA TODAY Storytelling Studio
- Amy Robinson, planning editor, USA TODAY Network
- Nathan Papes, visual journalist, Springfield News-Leader