The Knight Digital Media Center at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, acknowledging that people are hungry for data, has launched a simple tool that makes it easy to turn data into searchable databases. The tool, freeDive, uses the Google Visualization API to pull data from a Google Spreadsheet and generate an embeddable widget that you can drop onto any page — no coding required. You can see an example here.

The video below shows you the end result of a database that includes name, city and donation amount for 25,000 campaign contributors (meaning the tool scales well for large amounts of data).

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There’s no dearth of ways for journalists to congratulate and recognize themselves with awards. Whether you’re a small local newspaper or the most-watched national news show, there exists a seemingly endless list of contests and prizes to celebrate everything from the best public service journalism (Pulitzer anyone?) down to the most-specific specialized reporting (Media Orthopaedic Reporting Excellence Awards?). But within that sphere of contest categories, there’s not really been a contest solely focused on data journalism.

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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News organizations collect lots of data, and are increasingly allowing the public to access that data via APIs. Free access to the APIs is seen by news organizations as a form of serving the public’s interest.

But, there’s been a catch: The usage of almost all of these APIs is restricted to noncommercial use.

For example, the terms of use of The New York Times‘ developer network (which contains some of the most robust APIs around) states:

You shall not … use the NYT APIs for any commercial purpose or in any product or service that competes with products or services offered by NYT.

In the eyes of the Times, this constitutes commercial use:

1. Selling New York Times content or data in any application.
2. Charging a subscription fee for any New York Times content or data.
3. Selling any application built with one of our APIs.

(An exception is made for the Times’ Campaign Finance, Congress and NY State Legislature APIs, which use public data.)

But seeing an opportunity, USA Today earlier this month announced that they were going to open up three of their APIs to commercial use. Read more

Source: Indexed

Who doesn’t love a good infographic?

When done well, they concisely present information in a way no narrative story could, helping you see comparison and draw conclusions you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint on your own. But when they’re done poorly, or worse unnecessarily, they muddle information for the sake of being an infographic.

The goal of a designer is to make information more accessible and readable, whether it’s by choosing the perfect font to convey a mood, layout to draw readers through, or graph to show off data as only graphs can do. But when unprecedented amounts of data and graphics software fall into the hands of the masses, color and quantity sometimes trump care and quality.

Grace Dobush at HOW Interactive Design is on a campaign to stop the madness. In her post, Quit it With All the Infographics Already, she points out several good reasons to think before inking an infographic, including:

 
• Most infographics aren’t accessible for the visually impaired.
• Most infographics aren’t search-engine optimized.
• Those super-long infographics are practically useless on a mobile device.
• Of all online infographics, 89% contain statistics of dubious veracity. (Err, percentage is madeup, which is sort of her point.)
• Many infographics are just plain bad.

That’s not to say there aren’t reasons to use graphics. There are plenty of awesome graphical stories on news sites and blogs today. 10,000 Words highlights them often. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to go graphic goofy.

You should go read the rest of the post to get more background on those valid points, and to get HOW Magazine’s pointers on how to avoid falling into the infographic trap and responsibly create them.

(The image on this post, by the way, comes from Indexed, a comic of sorts drawn on index cards and using only charts. I’m not saying the charts are bad, but I’ll admit I’ve scratched my head in confusion at a few of them.)

Earlier this week, the colossal film, interactive, and music festival known as SXSW announced the opening of the 2012 SXSW PanelPicker, a community-driven voting portal that allows people to vote on panels which they wish to see at the upcoming conference. The PanelPicker votes and comments comprise 30% of the decision-making process for any given programming slot, with the SXSW Staff and SXSW Advisory Board accounting for 30% and 40% respectively. Voting is open from now until 11:59pm CT on Friday, September 2, 2011.

For those of you who may not be familiar with SXSW, here’s a brief video from SXSW that gives an overview of the conference:

While there are three distinct portions of the conference, SXSW Interactive offers the most diverse group of topics, especially for journalists. Currently, there are over 50 journalism-related panels up for voting in the PanelPicker. I’ve culled through them all, and here are fifteen which I think would be great for journalists of all kinds. Each panel description also includes a link to vote for the panel on the PanelPicker (voting does require registering for a free PanelPicker account).

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