Journalism

Social Media Enhances Another Government Function – Catching Bad Guys

September 28, 2012 Administration

Hey Sheriff. Excuse me officer. Heads up Ms. Publisher/Journalist. Take a look at this Steve Buttry story. We all want our journalism to have impact. Well, here’s impact for you: the Wanted by Police Pinboard launched by the Pottstown Mercury’s Brandie Kessler is resulting in arrests. In a recent Mercury story, Pottstown Police Capt. F. […]

Read the full article →

Other People’s Money

May 16, 2012 Economics

The journalist character, Melissa Tregarthen in Justin Cartwright’s, Other People’s Money: “I am a number,” she writes. “I am a statistic. I am a sacrifice on the altar of the free market. I have no power, except the power of words.” This is immediately after being given the “chop,” being laid off.

Read the full article →

The bigger they are …

July 11, 2011 Journalism

Nate Silvers, fivethirtyeight points out that News Corp News Corp lost $3.4 billion in market capitalization today.” Here’s the Google Finance link. From Paul Hilder and then Noah Raford, observes “Rapid catastrophic loss of reputation > News Corp lost $3.4 billion in market capitalization today.” The larger the difference between perception and reality, the bigger, […]

Read the full article →

Why did Gordon Brown put up with the intrusion into his personal and family information

July 11, 2011 Government

I’ve been following Gaby Hinsliff on Twitter for news on the News of the World, phone hack scandal. She wonders why Gordon Brown and his wife didn’t do anything about the reporting of their son’s illness: amazing thing re browns is they surely knew Fraser’s diagnosis dubiously obtained by papers. but didn’t complain, ask for […]

Read the full article →

NewsCorp is a criminal conspiracy … and worse

July 11, 2011 Data

From the Guardian, News International papers targeted Gordon Brown: Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family’s medical records (Emphasis added). … Brown was targeted during a period of more […]

Read the full article →

Knight Foundation Awards

June 23, 2011 Data

The Knight Foundation announced 16 winners of its news challenge. Interesting theme that emerged was the the “rise of the hacker/data journalist.” Several of the winners had or were developing technological tools. There were also a couple emphasizing governmental data.

Read the full article →

NYT on the end of OBL and using all the data

May 17, 2011 Information

Delayed reaction here, but they did a nice job so I’ll post anyway. The New York Times received lots of reactions to the the killing of Osama Bin Laden and here’s how they displayed it. Note that all the structured data are quite visible so that that the viewer can see both concentrations and variability. […]

Read the full article →

Quote of the Day

March 24, 2011 Camps

Sarah Hartley of the Guardian posted a couple days ago in Data expert moves on from ‘telephone journalism’ and quoted Francis Irving saying: In the end we’ll no more talk about data journalism than we talk now about telephone journalism. Irving has a successful track record of using the web to provide the public with […]

Read the full article →

Visualized Budget Data for the UK

March 23, 2011 Budget

Even a cursory view suggests to me that the Guardian has been making extra efforts at using data and visualized data at that in their reporting. You’ll find them particularly at their Datablog. Here’s their story on five key data sets in the latest budget. One graphic in particular stood out for me and that […]

1 comment Read the full article →

Visualizing Concentration of Historical Events

March 21, 2011 Geography

Gareth Lloyd, a software engineer at the BBC and Tom Martin pulled Wikipedia events that have geographical coordinates and did a neat, animated, historical visualization. Using Google Fusion and Maps, they also did a heat map. Lloyd and Martin did this for History Hackday. Is it biased? Sure, by whatever biases have accumulated in Wikipedia, […]

Read the full article →