April 2011
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My interview with American RadioWorks on our...
March 2011
2 posts
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Our investigation into standardized test scores →
How Foursquare found the world's "rudest" cities →
Hat tip to @clairemeaney for finding this.
February 2011
3 posts
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My slides from NICAR 2011
Are here:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/NICAR/NICAR_internet_reporting.pdf
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“Why aren’t data apps taking off at every paper?”
– http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/119853/key-departures-point-to-4-factors-critical-to-the-future-of-programming-and-journalism/
Alas, I’ve moved over to tumblr. Adios, Wordpress.
January 2010
1 post
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Examining money and college athletics
This week, my colleagues and I published the first story in an ongoing series on money going to college athletic programs. The stories are the result of our collecting tens of thousands of pages of financial documents, which universities must report to the NCAA each year.
The process, which began months ago (and even longer for my colleague Jodi Upton), has been cumbersome at times — having to...
July 2009
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Saving journalism, one database at a time
My editor forwarded me a good piece on how data can revitalize, if not save, professional reporting as we know it. OK, so maybe it won’t save it — but it might “empower” it, as the article points out:
http://www.mondaynote.com/2009/06/28/can-data-revitalize-journalism/
February 2009
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Goodbye, Rocky.
After nearly 150 years, one of Denver’s major papers has closed. I think this counts as the first large metro to go under as of late.
I could pontificate and get on my soap box, but I won’t, except to say: I hope the public wakes up soon. Sure, newspapers are a dying breed, but the content that the dead-tree edition afforded us (literally, in ad dollars) to produce will inevitably die, too.
...
January 2009
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Lobbying databases
The guv’ment doesn’t make it so easy to search for lobbying data, I’ve found, but a little work can make it so:
http://senate.gov/legislative/Public_Disclosure/database_download.htm
The quarterly files come zipped as XML files, which can be converted into database files. It’s much faster than going through the Web interface on the Senate’s site.
December 2008
1 post
Linux on Windows
I’m sure everyone knows this already, but cygwin provides a great way to use Linux commands on Windows. it was very helpful recently when I had to string lots of files together and use the “tail” command. Any other Linux tips for Windows are appreciated!
September 2008
1 post
Google map overlays and the mortgage crisis
The meltdown on Wall Street, which has become issue No. 1 in the race for the White House, was fueled in part by lots of risky lending in Arizona.
I helped a colleague of mine examine millions of loan applications, data which came from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. We took a look at three years’ worth of data, and found that many Census tracts in the Tucson and Phoenix...
August 2008
1 post
Fun with Chumby
So, I decided to break down and buy a Chumby, an Internet appliance of the squishy type.
It does lots of neat things, such as displaying news tickers, photos and your e-mail messages. It even has an alarm clock.
With all this fuss about news tickers, then, I made my own to display breaking news headlines from the Star, as well as hourly business updates.
So far, my coworkers aren’t really...
May 2008
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Social promotion in Tucson
After 10 months of intensive public-records negotiating, programming, and collaborating with editors and reporters, I’m finally done with a project that examined social promotion in Tucson-area schools.
The project was unique in the sense that few (if anyone?) has done this before. Social promotion, in a nutshell, is the phenomenon of pushing students to the next grade even though they don’t...
March 2008
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Converting those pesky PDFs to TXTs
It really irritates me when I ask public agencies for Excel or tab-delimited files, and I’m greeted with a PDF in my e-mail inbox.
Alas, if the coding is right, that issue can be fixed using PDF2TXT (if you have a PC). This basically allows you to strip out the plain text, with the appropriate tabs (if it’s a spreadsheet) to then copy into Excel.
Mac users, you may have another option. You can...
February 2008
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A new set of (graphics) eyes
We in the newspaper business can be stumped with ways to present complex information. We try our best with breakout boxes, charts and other morsels of digestible journalism, but it doesn’t always work well.
IBM has come up with a neat way to visualize complex pieces of data, such as Michigan’s most violent cities or state-by-state gasoline taxes. I’d be interested to see what Flint...
November 2007
1 post
Mapping foreclosures
ArcView is a very handy program for mapping information, particularly when you can visually find relationships between disparate sets of data.
Recently, I worked with another Star reporter to analyze foreclosure trends in Tucson, and compared those with the incidence of high-risk loans. We used two sets of data: The first, from NICAR, contained information on every mortgage application in the...
October 2007
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Woah. What just happened in Phoenix?
I’ve been following this arrest of two Phoenix New Times executives with much interest. Sadly, it hasn’t surprised me much, considering Sheriff Joe’s tough law-enforcement approach in the past, although the quick turnaround by Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas did.
The New Times folks wrote about what they called a “breathtakingly unconstitutional” request for information regarding their...