“We want to make all knowedge available to everyone, forever, and for free. So it’s an ambituous mission,” laughs Roger Macdonald, the archive’s television news project director. 

And it all comes down to closed captioning.

The San Francisco based non-profit records broadcasts, and teases out the news using closed captioning tags and other meta-data. Twenty-four hours after the first airing, the clip is available in the archive. It’s an invaluable resource for journalists, researchers, and documentarians to study what was said, when, where, and in what context. Want to play John Stewart? Go ahead and search clips of ‘Benghazi’ on Fox last week. It can also be used for more noble causes, like tracking political speech. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A breakdown of Tapestry Conference attendees, compiled by Ellie Fields.

NASHVILLE — A group of 100 journalists, academics, software developers, business leaders, designers, non-profits and government representatives are gathered at a hotel in Tennessee this morning to talk about weaving stories and data in the first-ever Tapestry Conference.

Jonathan Corum, graphics editor at the New York Times, opened the conference with a keynote about how he finds stories in data. More about Jonathan:

Jonathan Corum is the science graphics editor at The New York Times. His print graphics have won 15 awards from the Society for News Design and 8 medals from the international Malofiej competition. In 2009 the Times graphics desk received a National Design Award for communication design.

He talked about narrative, exploration, editing, audience and more. Here are the best tweets from his keynote address (after the jump).
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1. New York Times – Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget

This approach lets users select multiple options (tax increases and spending cuts) then watch on a scale how much money those decisions make in the short-term and longterm. You can read more about the methodology on the Economix blog.

Best feature: See impacts on both the short-term and long-term 

2. LA Times — California Budget Balancer

The LA Times first lets you select a starting point based on how much you’d spend on public schools, and from there, you can granularly reduce or eliminate funding in other areas using a slider. As you make decisions, you watch the remaining deficit drop. Unlike the NYT approach, the LA Times lets the user have more control over the values inputted, rather than basing it off real-life proposals.

Best feature: When you’ve come to a proposal you’re happy with, you can see your breakdown for where money is allocated, then share it on social media.  continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s responsive, it’s overflowing with data and it’s beautiful. The most recent project from The Chicago Tribune news apps team, Crime in Chicago, is a glowing example of the power of data in telling stories — and helping readers find their own stories in context of the big picture.

The standalone app lets easily learn about “crime on your block, in your community, along your commute, and more.” You can type your address or select from a map your community of interest to see an extensive breakdown of crime reports for the most recent 30 days, crime type breakdowns, historic crime trends for the community and granular locations for crime (e.g. garages, alleys, grocery stores). In South Chicago, for example, most violent crimes happen on the sidewalk whereas most property crimes and quality of life crimes happen in apartments.  But you don’t just get a dump of data from a table — there are colorful, interactive charts that visually convey the information in an easily-digestible way.

The app also pulls in recent headlines about the community in a “coverage” section on the community’s detail page, providing extra context or details about crimes that have happened there. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Journalists already on the job, both recent grads and lifers, don’t have to feel left out. Here’s a chance to bone up on your data analysis skills, learn more about tracking congress, and learn other skills to make you a better reporter and investigator. Best of all: The training is tailored specifically to journalists, including to their budget — which is to say, it’s free.

The Sunlight Foundation launched a series of online training courses, known collectively as Sunlight Academy, this month to help reporters better master their craft, with a heavy focus on watchdog tools and tips. They also have several politics related modules that can help track the presidential and other election campaigns as we head into the last few months before November.
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1. USA Today’s Candidate Match Game II

This fun tool asks you about whether you agree or disagree with certain statements, then asks you to adjust your “importance” gauge. As you answer questions, the graphic on the right changes to display whether you align more closely with Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. It’s functional, fun, shareable and well-designed. See the full project

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Whether it’s quarterly earning statements, census figures or standardized testing results, journalists on all beats can’t avoid data. It’s ubiquitous and, thanks to the Internet, readily available. Unfortunately, “data literacy” isn’t quite as common.

It’s one thing to know technical skills like how to format, filter and sort, and run basic pivot tables or access queries, and it’s another to really understand the data and math itself, let alone why the numbers matter and what they mean.

That’s why I was excited to see this post at Media Helping Media: “Journalists – become data literate in three steps.” The post outlines three questions every journalist should ask before diving into their data:

1. How was the data collected?
2. What’s in there to learn?
3. How reliable is the information?

Go read the post to learn more about why these questions matter most, and specific instances where they can make a very big difference. It’s a piece taken from the Data Journalism Handbook, which is worth checking out in and of itself, though more of a time committment.

Data literacy really boils down to good journalism, and the more you understand the numbers and their source, the more confidently (and correctly) you can report them.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Between the hashtag and the official blog, you’ll get a good overview of initial impressions and topics covered — from avoiding data dumps in stories to harvesting trends from social media. Chrys Wu, again this year, has done a fabulous job rounding up the multitude of presentations at NICAR.

Here are five of my favorite topics, but I encourage you to bookmark Wu’s page and peruse them all, because there are some awesome ideas and tips there:

• Human Assisted Reporting — This slideshow presents an “aha idea” that I can’t believe I never thought of: automating tasks beat reporters do regularly with data, and then programming your computer to do simple data analysis automatically. My favorite easy example of this was mining the daily police blotter for trends or keywords (who has the highest bail and what is the bail/the crime? any nurses, teachers, ministers, etc. arrested?)
• Weathering the Storm: Using data to bolster the traditional weather story — Maybe it’s the nearly four years I spent working as a news reporter at a mid-sized paper and the dozens of weather stories I was forced to work on, but I believe there’s a special place in journo-heaven for anyone who can turn the most over-used story topic into something new and interesting for readers/watchers/listeners. Here’s your ticket to attempting just that.
• Advanced Excel Tips — Excel is pretty much the program I use the most, and most heavily, on my work computer, after Firefox of course. So this tipsheet from the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s MaryJo Webster is not only a good refresher on bits I know well, but it also includes some great tips on doing things I haven’t quite mastered. From date functions to string functions, this is a solid list that I’ll be saving for future reference, and you should too.
• How to use election data (and other good stuff to know) — This is actually a round-up from John Keefe of his four presentations, including one on election night and maps and election data without databases. He also covers other interesting topics, including everything you need to know about APIs, using Google Spreadsheets as your backend CMS, and hacking the Census data.
• Build your first news app with Django — Their first step-by-step tutorial is how to build an interactive poll, with some other getting started resources.

There are many other topics covered, including on some of these same topics, as well as new tools to use and some examples of investigative data journalism at work. What was your favorite element of NICAR this year?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, is only in its third year of existence after launching in 2009. The organization is joined by long-established names on the winners list like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, ABC 20/20, Bloomberg and The Associated Press.

So how does one brand new organization compete with years of legacy? To start, try  51 million patient records — about 28 gigabytes of raw data. That’s how much information was analyzed for the yearlong series of investigative stories that revealed a pattern at a California-based hospital chain of billing Medicare for numerous rare medical conditions for high-paying bonuses. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Now there is: The Data Journalism Awards, which purports to be “the first international contest recognizing outstanding work in the field of data journalism worldwide.”

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Last week, I started a list of six data journalism blogs you should take note of. The post stemmed from a project some journalists are leading to develop a data-driven journalism handbook that covers all aspects of the field. This weekend, thanks to a massive effort by attendees at the Mozilla Festival in London, the project morphed from the bare bones of an idea into something very tangible.

In just two days, 55 contributors, from organizations such as the New York Times, the Guardian and Medill School of Journalism, were able to draft 60 pages, 20,000 words, and six chapters of the handbook. The goal is to have a comprehensive draft completed by the end of the year, said Liliana Bounegru of the European Journalism Centre, which is co-sponsoring production of the handbook. If you’re interested in contributing, email Bounegru at bounegru@ejc.net. You can see what the group has so far at bit.ly/ddjbook.

Since the handbook is still being tweaked, why not check out these data journalism blogs? continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today is the start of Mozilla Festival, a weekend-long celebration of sorts that brings together web developers, journalists, media educators and students to work on open web projects and learn from one another. #MozFest’s program includes design challenges, learning labs, presentations and more. There will also be plenty of time for people to simply chat with one another and possibly brainstorm the next idea that will transform the web.

One event that stood out to me calls for a group to kickstart the writing of a data-driven journalism handbook. Led by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Journalism Centre, the project’s goal is to create a handbook that will “get aspiring data journalists started with everything from finding and requesting data they need, using off the shelf tools for data analysis and visualisation, how to hunt for stories in big databases, how to use data to augment stories, and plenty more.”

Data journalism has quickly become a popular field yet many reporters are still in the dark about it. How do you go about getting the data? What do you do once you have the data? A perfect resource would be the data journalism handbook, but since it hasn’t been written yet, I came up with a list of six blogs that should definitely be added to your bookmarks tab, whether you’re looking for inspiration, basic skills, or advanced knowledge.

The first three are below and the last half will be published on Monday. continued…

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When it comes to working with and presenting data, Google reigns supreme. We’ve covered Google’s Chart Wizard, Google’s Public Data Explorer, and even ways to run a news website using Google Docs (with WordPress). Another of Google’s powerful data tools, Google Refine, lets users work with “messy” data sets and transform them into something amazing. Check out Part 1 of the Google Refine screencast.

Unlike Google’s general web-based data services, Google Refine is a standalone desktop application. Formerly known as Freebase Gridworks, the Google Refine tool has been used by the Chicago Tribune, data.gov.uk, and most famously by ProPublica for their “Dollars for Docs” investigation series from October 2010. Once you download and install the Google Refine tool, you interact with it through your web browser. You can create a new project from scratch, or you can import data sets from files stored on your computer. When your data is imported, that’s where the real power of the tool comes through.

You can use facets and filters to create subsets of data, as well as format strings of data which match your search patterns. For example, if you see the term “as soon as possible” and “ASAP” in the same data set, you can reformat both data strings to match each other. For more complicated queries, you can use the Google Refine Expression Language (GREL) to create regular expressions and isolate substrings of data to separate columns.

Once you’re done with formatting your data, Google Refine lets you export your work in a number of different formats, including as an Excel spreadsheet, an HTML table, or as JSON data, which you can change to match a wiki-style format. Google Refine also lets you hook into open web services, such as Google’s Language Detection Service or the open map service Nominatim.

Google Refine is a free download and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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By analyzing databases on topics on your beat you can find the real trends and back it up with statistics. Your job as a journalist is to make those numbers and statistics meaningful. (But don’t force the story, sometimes the data doesn’t support your hypothesis. It hurts, but it happens.)

Here are a few places you can find data that will help you support your stories with facts instead of trends.

Data.gov —This site will probably just overwhelm you with the sheer quantity of information. The hard part will be picking through what’s there for what’s relevant. But you can find some interesting federal government data, including everything from military marriage trends to consumer spending to climate change, if you dig. You can sort by the type of data, the department that collected it, the category, location, topic, and more. At least try a few searches to see what’s what — and whether it leads to or fits in any of your stories.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.