nickhagar.net

What It Is

nickhagar.net is the personal academic homepage of Nick Hagar, a U.S.-based scholar in computational communication and AI in journalism. The site's owner is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, and will soon join the University of Minnesota as an assistant professor. The homepage showcases his academic background, research outputs, and technical practice work.

Core Features & Content

The homepage is organized into four core sections:

1. Academic Publications: This section compiles the scholar's top conference and journal papers in news algorithms and computational communication, making it easy to follow his research directions.
2. Technical Writing: This section shares practical guides for implementing generative AI in investigative journalism, including useful tutorials like how to deploy a private AI locally and build investigative lead spreadsheets with Claude Code.
3. Open-Source Tools: Multiple research-related tool prototypes are hosted publicly here, including an unofficial API wrapper for Substack, code for collecting training data for large language models, and a cross-provider large model memory management tool. All source code is available on GitHub.

Pros, Cons & Accessibility

Pros: The content is specialized and highly professional, all research and practice outputs are shared openly, the layout is clean with no unnecessary clutter, and the site loads very quickly.
Cons: It is only a personal academic showcase site, does not offer complex services, and has a fairly narrow target audience.
Currently, the site is directly accessible to users in China, no VPN proxy is required.

Who It's For

This site is a great resource for academic peers in computational communication and computational journalism, technical practitioners at news organizations working on AI implementation, and researchers interested in media algorithms and content communication research. It is unlikely to offer much value for general users.