One Monday last June, a few teams at The Seattle Times got together to sift through about 30 ideas they’d collected from the newsroom for a hack week.

america an off-white conference room with exposed ductwork and windows looking out on Seattle’s Denny Way, the product, software development and user experience teams scribbled ideas onto big neon yellow and orange sticky notes.

They included: election app, podcast center, UGC contest tool, events calendar and analytics hub.

Nick Eaton, digital audience editor, asked for that last one. Could the developers build a dashboard, he wondered, that was actually easy to use and brought all the data that’s available into one place? Could they build a single tool that more clearly answered the question: How’s my story doing?

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