Collection of Miscellany

The Archive

Experiments in data journalism, spatial storytelling, and the intersection of code and narrative.

A rant about teaching journalism in 2026

journalism

education

AI

I need to get this out of my head. Trying to figure out what to teach in a journalism class in 2026 feels like being torn apart from the insides. And I can already feel the people thinking It’s Not That Hard, Just Teach The Basics blah blah blah sure. Easy for you to say. You’re either not teaching journalism in 2026 or you’re willfully blind as to what is going on right now. Faculty are under enormous pressure from university leadership and voices in industry that students must have AI skills when they leave. When asked what those are…

Teaching a one-hour throwaway news apps class

A step-by-step guide.

code

webdev

AI

What you will need: A Github Account (if you don’t already have one) Google Antigravity Some data in csv format. Step 1: Setup On the first page you see, you should see a big blue Open Folder button. Click that. For most of you, you’re going to need to create a new folder and that new folder must be named [githubusername].github.io where githubusername is your github username that you just created. It must match it exactly. So, for example, my github user name is mattwaite, so my folder is called mattwaite.github.io. It has to match your username and watch the…

Parsing PDFs with Antigravity

In a word: Gobsmacked.

code

analysis

AI

Among the wisest things I’ve ever seen written about AI is “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” The same can be said for journalism. I want AI to do the chores so I can do the journalism. Time I’m not manually pulling apart PDFs is time I can spend talking to people. Last week, Google launched their much anticipated Gemini 3 model, and much is being said and written about it.…

An R + LLM starter kit

code

analysis

AI

I’ve written before, I am at best an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to AI, LLMs and R. But I’m braver/dumber than most, so for a talk I’m giving to NE-RUG – the Nebraska R Users Group – and to the NICAR data journalism conference, I’ve got some resources and some code to share. R libraries : From the folks who brought you the comes , a library that supports talking to a large number of LLMs. To talk to the big commercial LLMs, you’ll need API keys, and that usually means having an API budget. But what I like…

An academic integrity-friendly code pal for R Studio

How to plug in an LLM to help – but not too much – in a world that wants to cheat

AI

code

r

education

One of the struggles on campus these days is all about where to draw the lines when it comes to AI in the classroom. There’s no end of discussion about students using ChatGPT to cheat, particularly on writing assignments. How do you stop it? How do you adapt to it? How do you convince students to do the work? Teaching students to write code is no different. I add a layer of difficulty in that I teach journalism and sports media students how to code. These are students who didn’t ask to learn how to write code, but we as…

Nebraska’s season long slide on offense

code

football

huskers

If you’ve been following Nebraska’s football season, you’d be forgiven if you thought it started out great and has slowly driven into a ditch as time went on. Even after a loss against Illinois in overtime, hope remained high. That is, until the Indiana game. A close loss at Ohio State revived some of that hope, and then a loss to UCLA crushed it. So what’s happening? The answer? The offense is slowly getting worse as the season goes on. That almost certainly has something to do with Nebraska hiring Dana Holgerson as an offensive consultant. How bad is it?…

A simple example of AI agents(?) doing journalism(?) work

code

analysis

AI

Let’s start this with some confessions: I’m at best an enthusiastic amateur with AI. I know more than most, and I know nothing in the grand scheme. Example: I’m not sure I have any idea of what an AI agent is. I think I do, but there’s so much marketing hype around them that I can’t know for sure. People much, much, much smarter than I am aren’t sure either. I teeter on the edge of two extremes. On the one hand, I am seeing AI as a fascinating, remarkable alien intelligence (to borrow Ethan Mollick’s description) that we have…

Another year, another attempt, another bracket disaster

code

analysis

Once again, I attempted to predict the outcome of the NCAA tournament using machine learning, and I had a class-load of students try the same. If you like the madness part of March Madness, this year is for you. It is not for machine learning algorithms based on regular season performance. At least not mine. Of the 14 brackets I and my students produced, using 14 different methods, we came up with 7 unique national title winners. Zero of them are right. The best brackets had two of the four Final Four teams, but none picked a team still playing…

Nebraska is not the best worst team in basketball again. They’re third best worst.

huskers

code

analysis

Last year, this post may have suggested that Nebraska would be better this year than last year. That Nebraska was the best worst team in college basketball, and with major recruits coming in and the Big Ten expected to take a step back, all looked up. Oops. It didn’t work out as expected – in spite of a late season surge. But let’s return to the question: Is Nebraska the best worst team in college basketball? Spoiler alert: Not this season. Returning to Sports Reference’s college basketball site, we find our friends the Simple Rating System and Strength of Schedule.…

Is Nebraska the best worst team in college basketball?

huskers

code

analysis

Nebraska fans haven’t had the best time watching basketball lately. The last two seasons have featured only seven wins in each season. This season they only won three games in the Big Ten, but that was an improvement over last season when they only won two. But anyone watching Nebraska basketball this season could see there was a difference between last season’s squad and this one. And given that the Big Ten was rated as the best conference in college basketball during the season, it begs the question: Is Nebraska that bad? In fact, are they the best worst team…

How I (poorly) filled out my NCAA bracket with machine learning

code

analysis

I do not know a lot about college basketball. I follow the travails of my employer and a little about the Big Ten Conference as a whole, but at best it’s surface knowledge. I kinda know who is good that we’re going to play and who isn’t. Beyond that, nada. Which is bad when it comes to tournament time. My typical pattern of filling out bracket is Have I Heard Of This Team, Do They Have a Legendary Coach or Do I Hate Them For Some Reason. Depending on the answers, I make my pick. It’s not rocket science, and…

Choosing a World Cup Team to root for in each match: An algorithmic approach.

The World Cup is here. For a large swath of the planet, we do not have a team in the tournament, which raises a question: Who do you root for game by game? I’m teaching a sports data visualization and analysis course this fall, so I started thinking if there was an assignment in here somewhere. Could students develop some kind of algorithm? And the more I thought about it, the more I realized: Nope. Here’s why, in pseudocode, that an algorithmic approach to choosing a side in each match is not something you can do in code: for each…

I wrote a data journalism manual for my college in 1997. They never used it, but they kept it.

data journalism

retro

In October 1997, I was trying to graduate from college. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications told me that I needed 19 credit hours to graduate mid year, and that’s how many I was taking. That is, until they told me six weeks before graduation that I needed one more. To get that credit hour, the Journalism Department chair agreed to let me complete an independent study. In that independent study, for one credit hour, I was to create a Computer-Assisted Reporting class. The proposal I had to write said I would create a syllabus, recommend…

Using Lego to teach data visualization

Today in my data visualization class, I made students visualize meaningful differences between this year’s Super Bowl teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Except I made them do it with Lego. A little silly, yes, but I wasn’t just gilding my Professor of the Year application, I swear. There was a purpose. The first time I taught this class, I steered too hard into tools and code. We spent a little time on the history, theory and thinking behind data visualization and lot of time on teaching tools and later trying to cram enough d3 at them…

Everything I Know About Data I Learned From 70s Album Rock…

data journalism

talks

Everything I Know About Data I Learned From 70s Album Rock Radio, my Newsgeist 2014 Ignite talk.

A classroom experiment in Twitter Bots and creativity

This semester, I’m teaching a class in Story Bots, which is really a programming class disguised as a journalism class. I’m teaching students enough programming that they can automate journalistically useful things, things like scrape a website and alert you to a potential story. Or take a dataset and turn each record into a journalistic narrative. One of the assignments was to make a Twitter bot. They could do what they wanted with it, but it had to use Twitter and had to run on a simple cron job. It had to tweet, and they had to put their bot…

UNL CoJMC students: Two data/programming/future courses for the fall

If you’re a UNL CoJMC student looking for courses in the fall, here’s two I’m teaching you should take a look at: JOUR407: Investigative and Computer-Assisted Reporting: This class is all about data journalism – emphasis on both parts of that phrase. I’ll show you how to incorporate data and data analysis into your stories, regardless of format. You’ll learn techniques that will help you break a dataset down and interview it like a source. We’ll get our hands dirty with data and we’ll turn those into stories. We’ll add some data visualization to the toolbox as well. The not-close-to-complete…

A 5-step NICAR recovery plan

First time at NICAR this year? Awesome. Welcome. This was my 15th conference. I started in 1997 in Nashville. I was a senior in college, desperate to find a job, and NICAR was an amazing and formative experience for me. I made friends, learned a lot and found a kind of nerdy spiritual home. NICAR has become like a weird nomadic family for me. It’s my tribe. A really nerdy, wonderful tribe. But I can remember being in your shoes after my first NICAR. You’re bone tired, but JACKED UP. Excited, but uneasy. There’s so much to learn. So many…

A small step toward solving the our curriculum is too full problem

One of the arguments used to push back against adding new things into journalism school curricula is “Our curriculum is too full! We can’t possibly add anything more! What are we going to do? Stop teaching writing? Or editing?” First, the argument is silly — no one said anyone was going to stop teaching writing or reporting or whatever “fundamental” skill is most beloved by the combatant. Second, it’s not an either or problem. Put another way, you can view a crowded curriculum as a challenge or a lament. Too many view it as a lament and throw their hands…

Unconference panel pitch I will someday make

I want to solve a journalism problem with a MakerBot. What is it? I hate having a fantastic solution and no problem to solve. Being a solution in search of a problem sucks. I’m hoping to get students thinking about this in an open lab time I’m running. But seriously. I want a MakerBot. My gut says there’s a journalism problem to solve here. But I don’t know what it is yet. Yet.

The Minimum Viable Participant

In any software development project, you have a line in the sand called the Minimum Viable Product. It’s the point where you’ve got it working well enough and with enough features that the thing has a chance. Barely. It’s not a goal or a standard, it’s a marker of progress. There’s been a bunch of debate about what journalism schools should be doing now to change curriculum in the face of disruption in the industry. It’s a good debate. I agree with some, have criticisms of others and view this whole “cram more into a degree” issue as a challenge…

Replacing Reporters With Robots I Might Be

Replacing reporters with robots? I might be trolling a little, but robotics and programmatic bots are going to play a greater role in reporter’s futures than you might think.

Here Is John Keefe And I Talking About The Near

Here is John Keefe and I talking about the near field future of sensors and journalism at the Tow Center’s Sensor Weekend. We gave the second keynote of the day.

A new way for data journalists to thwart newsroom IT: the Raspberry Pi

One of my old jokes is that newsroom IT puts the No in Innovation, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to get around them. And I’ve been playing around with a good one: The Raspberry Pi. Unfamiliar with the Pi? The Model B Pi is a $35 computer that’s about the size of a deck of cards. It’s got an ethernet port, and you supply the hard drive in the form of an SD card, the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Now, for $35, you’re not getting a ton of horsepower, but for simple repetitive tasks it works great.…

Adventures in prototyping

Things we have done today in my office: Stolen two cups of dirt from a construction site. Made a pot of mud with one cup of dirt. Microwaved the second cup of dirt in the faculty lounge. Measured the the sensor output of totally dry dirt versus a soaking wet pot of mud. Used the point-slope form of linear algebra to determine the formula for the line between dry and wet. In a journalism school. And it worked. More about this later, including what it’s all about and code.

Writing stories with code, part 2: conditional leads from trends

See part one here. Get the code, such as it is, here. When we last left off, we had a script that would loop through a list of data and write a news lead out of it. All that the script did was look at two numbers and decide if the crime rate went up or down and then wrote an appropriate sentence. Something like this: Lexington police reported more violent crime in 2010 compared to 2009, according to federal statistics. But, sometimes, just one year isn’t enough. Sometimes a city gets on a roll, crime goes down for several…

Writing stories with code

There’s a lof of interest and attention right now around the idea of computers writing stories from data. As newsrooms shrink and business models implode, managers are casting about for anything that can keep the pages filled/updates flowing. Stories about automated news all seem to ask the straw-man question: “Can software replace humans?” I have two thoughts about this: 1. Software bots will never be able to write the most compelling stories, because telling a story is an inherently human act that requires real humanity to do well. There is no algorithm for humanity. 2. It is trivially simple for…

Drones Soldering Irons Micro Controllers

Drones, soldering irons, micro controllers, multimeters, code … I reject your notions of what a journalism education must be. How journalists gather information, how it is collected, how it is stored, how it is processed, how it is analyzed are all open for wild experimentation. And there has never been a better time.

Numeracy

Reading the paper this morning, I was interested to read two stories. The first was about the University of Nebraska Board of Regents approving at 3.75 percent tuition increase. The second was about those same regents moving forward with cutting the number of credit hours to graduate. The two stories were separate, and in print were in different sections. Why am I interested in this? Because of the logic bomb contained within them that you’ll find if you just do the math. In the tuition increase story, you learn that the increase will add $94 to $116 to a students…

Help me plan a hacker space/drone lab

I’ve got an opportunity to build a hacker/maker space + drone lab in a journalism college. I’ve been asked to come up with requirements for the room. Square footage, furniture, gear, storage, you name it. Does your university have a hacker space? What does it look like? Are there pictures of it online? Got a URL? Here’s what I’m thinking, broadly. Not going to get all this, but you don’t get if you don’t ask: Countertop space for working on drones or Arduino projects. Locking storage for the same. Couches? Long desks and chairs (like this)? Something different (like this)?…

If you were teaching a course in data visualization…

… what would you include? I’m developing a course in data viz over the summer and am in the brainstorming phase now. Here’s what I’ve got. What would you do? Course Description A written narrative is not always the best way to convey information. Sometimes, you have to see the data in order to see the meaning in it. With more data available than any other time in our history, being able to visualize data is becoming a vital communication skill. This course will cover a wide array of subjects related to gathering, analyzing, processing and visualizing data. Students will…

Toward a solution to the more tech in J-school problem

journalism

education

manifesto

rant

First, lets state some general conditions and agree to them: - There is a generally agreed upon need for tomorrow’s journalists – no matter what area of the craft they intend to go into – to have more technological skill and experience than their past counterparts. There is not a generally agreed upon way to accomplish this increase in technological skill within a j-school curriculum. There is not a generally agreed upon list of tech skills that journalism students should/must have before graduating to become a journalist today. There is a … tension … in newsrooms and faculties over the…

Using Python to access tweets from the command line

Here at the Harvard of the Plains, I teach a class in digital product development I like to call Programming as an Act of Journalism. Lots of people ask me about it and I’m always a bit cagey about it because, to be frank, I’m still kind of making it up as I go. My course goals could actually fill an entire degree, so I spend a lot of time pushing and pulling against my wants and needs for the class. But the basic outline is I take College of Journalism students who know nothing about code and product development…

A completely arbitrary list of takeaways from two unconferences

This past weekend, I attended Spark Camp: Data, an unconference in Austin focused on using data to tell stories, whatever they may be. A month before, I was at News Foo, an unconference at Arizona State University that brings technologists and journalists together to talk about … whatever they want to talk about regarding the future of news. Both conferences included a lot of chatter about journalism schools and what they should be doing. People I talked to were all fascinated to hear I teach programming and data at a journalism school. At both, listening to this discussion going on,…

A word of advice for Code Year participants

A whole herd of people are learning to program this year through free weekly lessons via email from Code Year. Some, like me, are interested in new lessons and approaches. Some people are starting from scratch. I have a word of advice to you, one I need to follow myself, as you get started on your Code Year. Unplug. Turn off Tweetdeck. Shut down IM. Turn off your email notifier. No one has liked your status in the last minute, so don’t check. Unplug. Why? Because you’ll learn nothing in 20-30 second bursts between distractions. Learning to code, like many…

Data journalism class description: your thoughts?

I’m teaching a data journalism/investigative reporting class for the first time this spring. I’ve got the class pretty well mapped out – I know what I’m going to teach – but I’m struggling with a course description. Here’s what I’ve got. Fellow data nerds, what say you? Every day, more of our lives is becoming digital and more of that life is getting stored in a database somewhere. With a historic explosion of data about everything going on right now, reporters need the skills to analyze and understand data to then write the stories hidden in the information. Gone are…

Thinking out loud: The management wisdom of Battlestar Galactica

I’m going to News Foo in Phoenix in a few weeks, and I’m thinking of proposing an Ignite talk there called the Management Wisdom of Battlestar Galactica. I’m a huge fan of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series that was on Syfy. Besides having lead a rag-tag fleet of the last humans left alive in a Cylon holocaust, I think Admiral William Adama would have been a pretty decent project manager. Here’s what I’ve come up with as project management wisdom from the Admiral and the show: - Sine Qua Non. Means “without which not” or the must-have thing that makes…

Help me refine an incomplete idea

The McCormick Foundation and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies are funding specialized reporting institutes in 2012 and are taking applications now. I saw this and had an idea for one, but I’m not convinced it’s fully baked. Help me out by adding your suggestions in the comments below. The idea (the short version): Reporting for News Apps: Getting, Cleaning, Vetting, Analyzing and Visualizing Data to Tell Stories on the Web. The slightly longer version: Done right, news applications require a combination of skills, from investigative reporting to data literacy to information design principles to programming. A reporter working on…

Journalism students vs. tech-focused students

Here in my first semester on the faculty at the Harvard of the Plains, I get to work with students in both the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Raikes School for Computer Science and Management. With both groups of students, I’m working through problems that can be described as technology+journalism = ?? When confronted with a code challenge – HTML, JavaScript, Python/Django whatever – I have noticed student reactions can be classified thusly: Journalism student: I can’t do this. This is impossible. I’ll never get this. Tech oriented student: I can’t do this now, but learning how…

News nerd rage: the trouble with conferences

I’ve been having somewhat of an existential crisis of late. I’ve been a speaker at multiple journalism conferences a year for more than a decade running now and I have started to wonder at the value of all that talking. Not that I feel all those sessions weren’t valuable – they were – but were they as valuable as they could have been? Could we have gotten a few more people over the wall? Could we have snagged a few more minds? Michelle Minkoff has been thinking about this too, and asked me for some advice. You should head over…

Me vs. 130 Journalism 101 students: The epic Q&A

journalism

future

manifesto

politifact

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Journalism 101 class taught by Professor Scott Winter and the dean of the college, Gary Kebbel. Thinking it was just a simple come, talk, answer questions and leave, I was surprised to find that they had all come with questions and, while I was talking, were texting them to a single Google Voice account for me to answer. Holy Inbox Disaster, Batman. So it’s taken me a bit to dig out, but here’s my answers, for anyone who cares. I…

Some very smart posts about killing your CMS

journalism

data

Since I wrote my opus hating on legacy CMSes, I have been kicking the idea around in my head here and there, pondering just what this thing would look like, from backend systems to code to the presentation layer. Never anything fully baked or worth writing down. In the past week, I’ve come across two posts that are just brilliant. And they dovetail nicely together. First, Stijn Debrouwere asks a hell of a good question: And that question is: what would the ideal web delivery platform look like if our priority was to help us piece together different components, not…

Take A Few Minutes And Watch This And 1 Tell Me

research

journalism

future

Take a few minutes and watch this and 1) tell me we’re not living in the motherflippin’ future and 2) this bad boy couldn’t be used for some very, very cool journalism. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods … you name it. Any kind of disaster where spatial extent is newsworthy.

What would you want out of a class taught by a journalist-programmer?

journalism

education

You know journalism is in trouble when you know this: I’m being invited to teach a class at a respected journalism school. The fun part, and not a very surprising part given the state of the industry right now, is that neither they nor I have a really solid idea what the class is going to be. The class will start in the fall of 2010, so we have time to figure it out. Obviously, given what I do now, they’re not asking me to give a seminar on modern American narrative. I’m a journalist who builds web sites. I…

The key lesson I learned building PolitiFact: Demos, not memos

journalism

django

politifact

newsapps

So there was a little news around here lately. PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize. To say I’m still in shock is an understatement. A week later, it doesn’t seem real. All week long, we’ve been talking about how PolitiFact started, how it all came together. It’s been fun remembering how it started out with Bill Adair having an idea and me having an idea on how we could pull it off. The crude mock-ups, the development environment on a box that was headed for the trash. I still can’t believe we did it. But out of the many lessons I…

Telling the Google Bot no

newsapps

On every web project I’ve worked, one of the key/top/vital priorities was to make sure that Google could index every single last word of the site so that if someone was searching for what we had, they’d find it. My most recent project turned that on its head. What if you don’t want Google to index everything? What if you only want Google to index this, but not that? The project where this came up was Tampa Bay Mug Shots, a site that displays the mug shots of people booked into county jails in three Florida counties as they come…

Build something or STFU

journalism

newsapps

This blog has been quiet of late because I’ve been working in every spare moment I have on a couple of projects that are going to launch soon, good lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Given that I’m sleep deprived, stressed and generally ground down to a nub, it’s a bad, bad time for me to read my media-heavy RSS feeds. Before I get myself into trouble, I just want to say this: If all these people who know so much about journalism on the web spent less time on waving their arms in hysterics and actually built something…

Twitter, marketing and the devil

newsapps

twitter

marketing

Everything you need to know about using Twitter for marketing and PR is at this very descriptive url: http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/ That’s right: Don’t. Don’t use Twitter for marketing. Why? Let me draw a comparison for you: What would you call someone who uses a program to automatically send you an annoying volume of email? A spammer. So what makes you think that because it’s 140 characters and on some trendy web service that blasting away with soulless and automatic links isn’t spam? So that’s why I say automated means to add content to Twitter, like Twitterfeed, are the devil: It tempts…

Data = Content: Content = Data

journalism

data

content

platforms

newsapps

Mark Potts had some nice things to say about the new version of PolitiFact that we recently launched. But one of the things he wrote I wanted to amplify: None of this really looks like traditional journalism. The Obameter doesn’t follow conventional story formats in any way, and is really a hybrid between data, reporting, news and information presentation. We need to see a lot more of this. There are a many different ways to tell a story, especially online, and the more experimentation we see with journalism forms, the faster the state of the art will evolve and thrive.…

New app: Neighborhood Watch

journalism

databases

django

I’ve launched a new app at work: Neighborhood Watch. We’ve got lots of plans for it, but at launch it focuses on home sales in over 200 neighborhoods in Pinellas and Pasco counties in the Tampa Bay area. The seed for this app actually started in 2004, when I wrote this. At the time, we did 30 stories in two days across all the zoned editions of the Times in one shot. One snapshot in time. This new app will do the same thing … every week. The maps, the data, the trends, the graphics, all will updated by script,…

DjangoCon and me

personal

django

The program for the very first DjangoCon is up and my name is on it. And it’s not a typo. I’m speaking at the very first DjangoCon. My three reactions, in rough order: 1. I am so excited I can’t even tell you. 2. I am so honored it’s ridiculous. 3. I am so scared out of my freaking gourd it’s not even funny. You see, I still and probably always will think of myself as a reporter playing web developer. There’s programmer journalists and journalist programmers. I feel like a third group: Journalist making it up as he goes,…

How not to be a Wordpress hero

journalism

There’s a group of fellow journalists who are getting really sick of what we’re calling Wordpress Heroes. What is a Wordpress Hero? Back home, we’d call them All Hat and No Cattle. A Wordpress Hero is someone smart enough to setup a blog and fire away with grand ideas, but too dumb to use things like, oh, evidence, reporting, examples and other such annoyances. All talk, no do. I’m all for conversation, sharing ideas, throwing things out there. What I’m tired of are people who make grand sweeping statements and do nothing to back them up. So, in the spirit…

Thoughts on Everyblock and context

data

journalism

newsapps

First, the grains of salt: I don’t live in an EveryBlock city. I think a key part of EveryBlock is the visceral connection you have with your neighborhood. I don’t have that, so view my comments with that in mind. Huge Adrian Holovaty fan. Huge Django fan. Big believer in breaking out of the story centric worldview. And now let me get this out of the way: EveryBlock is not something newspapers should fear. Here it is. I was wrong. I wrote that last year. Now, I don’t think newspapers need to fear this. Study it? Emulate parts of it?…

Molten content, data ghettos and why your CMS problems are an excuse, not a reason

journalism

data

newsapps

The other component of the data ghetto that bothers me is that you can’t find that data outside the ghetto. Please, someone point me to a place where there’s dynamic content being fed to the story level pages. I have yet to see where someone’s crime data is being fed into a story about a crime, i.e. a map of murders from the data ghetto’s crime application dynamically generated on a story page about a murder. Or a list of the largest donors to a politician from a campaign finance app on a story about a politician. And that seems…

Data ghettos

data

journalism

newsapps

rant

One resolution for this year: Post more often. Starting now. I’m not sold on the whole Data Desk/Data Center idea that a lot of newspaper websites are trying out. I hate to say all this because at a lot of places, the people responsible for them are my friends. But for all the love I have for putting data online, there’s something that has bothered me about the way they’re going about it. A friend summed it up for me recently: The Data Ghetto. The Data Ghetto is that one mishmash page where all of that site’s databases are lumped…

Why the journalist in programmer/journalist matters

journalism

newsapps

In a comment, Ben asked how PolitiFact went from idea to PolitiFact. How did that get refined into the site we see today? Was the content and feature refinement mostly the work of web people or people from the print newsroom? Any lessons learned to help the rest of us help our editors and reportorial colleges see the new dimensions web apps can bring to conventional content? The content and feature refinement, at least at first, was the work of Bill Adair and I almost exclusively. After we first talked over the idea, I sketched out how I thought the…

Announcing PolitiFact

politifact

journalism

data

newsapps

It’s been quiet around here for a while. There’s a good reason. It’s called PolitiFact and it marks a major shift in my career. What is PolitiFact? The site is a simple, old newspaper concept that’s been fundamentally redesigned for the web. We’ve taken the political “truth squad” story, where a reporter takes a campaign commercial or a stump speech, fact checks it and writes a story. We’ve taken that concept, blown it apart into it’s fundamental pieces, and reassembled it into a data-driven website covering the 2008 presidential election. The whole site is inspired by Adrian Holovaty’s manifesto on…