Our investigation into standardized test scores
How Foursquare found the world's "rudest" cities -
Hat tip to @clairemeaney for finding this.
Are here:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/NICAR/NICAR_internet_reporting.pdf
“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.
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 scan and pull out, withpainstakingly detailed programming, the underlying data. It’s part of a process that geeks call “optical character recognition,” and can be difficult. Luckily for us, the documents have enough uniformity and subtotals that work as built-in methods for error-checking. Our first story found that $800 million in subsidies (tax money, university support and student fees) were propping up large, public football schools in 2008. Here’s thelink to that story, and to our searchable database.
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/
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. J-linx has good commentary on this subject, and it’s worth a read. The Rocky’s Web site (what’s left of it) has a good archive, including the final edition in PDF form.
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.