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Depth Reporting (GeoFeed.net)
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 03:27:07 +0100
Panoramic pictures on newspaper Web sites
Geographical References: New York / New York, New York
A big part of journalism is taking readers places they can't go themselves. For that reason I love the way newspaper sites like USA Today and The New York Times are using panoramic pictures. Here's software to make it happen.
Disciplined Attorneys Search
PI Buzz's Tamara Thompson has created a Google Custom search engine to make it easier to find information about disciplined attorneys. She writes:
This is a search tool to assist in finding lawyer discipline records when you don?t know the state in which the action may have occurred. Search by attorney name across the various state bar and Supreme Court sites that have attorney disciplinary records online in a searchable form. This does not encompass all states or even all records that are in any individual states? online attorney disciplinary index.
FiveThirtyEight.com
Geographical References: Michigan
... offers "Electoral Projections Done Right." 538 is the number of electors in the electoral college and FiveThirtyEight's mission is "to give you the best possible objective assessment of the likely outcome of upcoming elections." It does that by obsessively slicing and dicing poll and other data. Here's how the site says it differs "from other poll compilations":
Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages.
Secondly, we include a regression estimate based on the demographics in each state among our 'polls', which helps to account for outlier polls and to keep the polling in its proper context.
Thirdly, we use an inferential process to compute a rolling trendline that allows us to adjust results in states that have not been polled recently and make them ?current?.
Fourthly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g. future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction.
One feature I especially like is its estimates of "Pollster-Introduced Error." "PIE is what a tennis aficionado might call "Unforced Error"; it is error that results from poor methodology," the site explains.
I didn't even know I was running
Big city advice for journalists in flyover country
Geographical References: New York / New York, New York
Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the blog PressThink, gives his take on "If you were a print reporter at a mid-sized newspaper in a mid-sized American city, what would you do?"
Eight Ways to Get Interactive Data on Your Site
... from The Uncharted Backwaters of the Unfashionable.
Freebase Parallax
... is "A new way to browse and explore data" by David Huynh. Watch the video on the site -- someday, perhaps far, far in the future, the way it's going, we will be able to browse data gathered by news organizations as richly and as artfully as that. (The video is a best-case scenario. In practice, my data browsing with Parallax didn't go as smoothly as demonstrated in the video.) Parallax leverages Freebase, "an open, shared database of the world's knowledge." Huynh works as a research scientist for Metaweb Technologies, the company behind Freebase, and worked on the Simile project at MIT. (I used Simile's Timeline a few years ago to make an interactive timline of the Comair crash).
UPDATE: Jon Udell interviewed Huynh a few days ago for his Interviews with Innnovators podcast series.
[via Ryan Sholin's Friendfeed]
Justia legal directory
The fine legal site Justia has a new legal directory. It's still in "pre beta," whatever that means. Here's what you get if you search for Louisville criminal lawyers.
[via Robert Ambrogi's LawSites]
The law on journalists' privilege
The Federation of American Scientists has put online a recent Congressional Research Service report (PDF) about the law governing journalists' privilege and legislation before Congress dealing with the subject.
Researchers say government should focus on making its data easily available, not build its own ...
Four Princeton University researchers say government should devote its time to making its data easily available rather than building its own Web sites. They say "Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data."
The cop, the brownies and the 911 tape
A good cop reporter on a hot story always gets the 911 tape. It certainly makes this story special:
Via FailBlog
Political Party Time
Geographical References: Washington
The Sunlight Foundation's Party Time documents "the Political Partying Circuit."
Sunlight's Party Time is a project to track parties thrown at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions as well as fundraising activities by all lawmakers running for Congress that happen all year round in Washington, D.C. and beyond. Since we don't hear about all the parties, you can also tell us if you know where the party is and we don't.Here, for example, is a list of Louisville Congressman John Yarmuth's parties.
Sadly, I looked for a wallflower page, where I would hang out, but couldn't find one.
Open Car Price
Recently I wrote about Web sites that help you get better repair estimates for your car. After I wrote that I heard from one of the people behind Open Car Price, which lets you share and compare car deals. Frank Wang wrote:
OpenCarPrice.com is a "crowdsourcing" project to build a database of "actual paid price" for new cars. All sales records are submitted by people who recently bought a new car or got a quote from a dealer.
Such a database has never existed before (car dealers will never share such information). It brings the much-needed price transparency that will help consumers save hundreds or even thousands of $$$ in price negotiation.
I won't be using the site any time soon because I plan on driving my 13-year-old Saturn until it collapses into a pile of rusted parts, but you may find it handy.
Videos of significant and noteworthy Kentucky trials
Geographical References: Kentucky
Two legal blogs have teamed up to post videos online "of opening and closings of the more significant and noteworthy Kentucky cases." The Kentucky Trial Court Review, a newsletter that summarizes trial verdicts from across the state, contributes summaries of the cases. The Kentucky Law Review gives the background of the effort.
CongressionalBadBoys
... tracks public servants who serve themselves:
Over 11,700 Members of Congress have served this great Nation. Overwhelmingly, they have been hard working, dedicated, intelligent, and deserving of the courtesy title "The Honorable." But then there are the Congressional BadBoys, the one-half of one percent, or so, of rotten apples, done in by their all too human frailties. It's the same old story: power, money, booze, drugs, and sex.
Here's the complete honor roll, which includes girls too, by the way.
The Opposition Research Training Blog
Geographical References: Virginia
... offers "Tips and Resources for Opposition Researchers." The blog is written by Larry Zilliox, a Virginia private investigator and the author of "The Opposition Research Handbook: A Guide to Political Investigations." Opposition research -- "oppo" -- is the investigation of political opponents. You can read up on it in the Wikipedia.
GeoCommons Finder!
... is a Web site for finding and sharing freely available geographic data.
ZipWho.com
... claims to be "The Most fun you can legally have with ZIP codes":
We started this ZIP code demographics site in April 2008 because existing census statistics tools failed to satisfy the needs of power users. Many Web sites allow users to query the median household income of a ZIP code, but that dollar figure alone does not indicate how one neighborhood's population compares to others around the country. ZipWho.com fills this information gap by displaying a national percentile rank (0 - 99) next to every data element.
In addition to basic ZIP code lookup functionality, our site allows users to search by demographics. Small business owners, direct marketing professionals, and real estate investors can appreciate this powerful market segmentation feature that is not offered by any other Web site.
Map the Mess
Geographical References: Ohio
Ellen Miller at the Sunlight Foundation blog writes about "Map the Mess":
A group of citizen journalists in the Cleveland metro, so outraged by corruption within their local government, have taken matters into their own hands. Working in conjunction with local investigative journalism efforts, they?ve launched Map the Mess, a grassroots effort to shed light on the workings of business and government in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. They use social networking maps to reveal connections in government and to illustrations of how public officials conduct business in the county. They hope that the site provides enough transparency to the local government as to change the pattern of ?patronage and privilege that frustrates reform and productivity.?
Computers are for reporting, not Donkey Kong
In his farewell column after taking a buyout from The Baltimore Sun, Mike Himowitz recalls buying his first computer in 1983 - an $800 TRS-80 from RadioShack:
... I learned how to do some useful things with the machine besides play Donkey Kong.
I used it to track congressional voting records, analyze racial voting patterns in city elections, and figure out where candidates were getting their money - and spending it.
There wasn't much commercial software in those days - or not that I could afford - so I rolled my own. When somebody actually wrote a spreadsheet for that little computer, I thought I was in heaven - and used it to do a series on defense spending.
Today this is known as Computer Assisted Reporting, a recognized specialty that gives reporters and editors the power to sort through huge volumes of public data and write stories that might have taken months or years in the days before PCs - if they were possible to do at all. Like me, most of the people who do this are not math jocks or geeks - just reporters who want answers to questions and use computers as a tool.
Assessing Partisan Bias in Federal Public Corruption Prosecutions
Geographical References: New York / New York, New York / Clinton, New York
... is a new paper by Sanford C. Gordon of New York University's Department of Politics. The abstract:
The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal has raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between officials deciding whether to engage in corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to be lower than those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both the Bush and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional analysis suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.
His data sources for the study included TRAC, the Federal Justice Statistics Resource Center, Nexis and the federal district courts' Case Management/Electronic Case Files system.
Ways to publish charts on the Web
... from OECD Factblog. Options covered include Excel, Flickr, Google spreadsheet, Zoho, Swivel, Many-Eyes, Processing, jpGraph, the Google Chart API and the Yahoo! Chart API.
Everyday, bloggers and site editors use statistics to prove a point. How convenient would it be if they could easily support their argument with a chart. This is the type of thing that goes without saying in the print world, but is not that obvious on the web and on blogs.
Monica Goodling on how to do Web and database research
Geographical References: Florida
The U.S. Justice Department report (PDF) on how former Justice Department staffer Monica Goodling vetted potential employees for proof they were "good Americans" summarizes how she used the Web and Nexis to do her research. From page 20 of the report:
The Legal Pad says the search string "summarizes (neatly if depressingly) our recent political history."We found that Goodling?s Internet research on candidates for Department positions was extensive and designed to obtain their political and ideological affiliations. We determined that while working in the OAG, Goodling conducted computer searches on candidates for career as well as political Department positions. Goodling used an Internet search string in her hiring research that she had received from Jan Williams, her predecessor as the Department?s White House Liaison. At some time during the year Williams served as White House Liaison, she had attended a seminar at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and received a document entitled ?The Thorough Process of Investigation.? The document described methods for screening candidates for political positions and recommended using www.tray.com and www.opensecrets.org to find information about contributions to political candidates and parties. The document also explained how to find voter registration information. In addition, the document explained how to conduct searches on www.nexis.com, and included an example of a search string that contained political terms such as ?republican,? ?Bush or Cheney,? ?Karl Rove,? ?Howard Dean,? ?democrat!,? ?liberal,? ?abortion or pro-choice,? as well as generic terms such as ?arrest!? and ?bankrupt!?
When Williams left the Department in April 2006, she sent an email to Goodling containing an Internet search string and explained: ?This is the lexis nexis search string that I use for AG appointments.? The string reads as follows:
[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
Google tries to organize the world's knowledge with Knol
Google says a Knol is "A unit of knowledge." It's the name Google's chosen for its new Wikipedia-like site, where anyone can write "an authoritative article about a specific topic" and theoretically, at least, reap Google ad profits if enough people read it. The Official Google Blog says:
The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.
There's now a debate whether Google has crossed the line and become a direct competitor to newspapers. The most obvious threat, though, is to Wikipedia, which has a good summary of the issues Knol raises.
Google tried to get into the knowledge-organizing business before with Google Answers and failed, so we'll see how this turns out.
Breitbart.com: "Get connected to the news as fast as possible."
While scanning the latest list of top 50 online news sources, I noticed Breitbart.com, which ranks 50 and which I hadn't heard of before in spite of the excessive time I already spend on the Web:
Breitbart.com offers real-time access to top news and analysis sources. You can monitor up-to-the-minute feeds from wires, newspapers, networks, key blogs and more. And there are multiple options for exploring topics by channel. While some news sites select stories for the user and others allow users to rank favorite news stories, Breitbart emphasizes user access to the raw news feeds -- kind of an organized grocery store of news.
Special Thanks to Google for their wonderful mapping api.