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My interview with American RadioWorks on our investigation into D.C. test scores
(Source: americanradioworks.publicradio.org)
"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/
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 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.
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/
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 open the PDF inside Preview, a lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat. Then, you copy the contents into TextEdit, and save that as a text file to open inside Excel. There’s also Adobe’s free service, pdf2txt@adobe.com. Simply e-mail a PDF attachment to that address, and you’ll get back a text file in return.
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 Expatriates has to say about its namesake city having a sizable spot on the first map.
