Journalism

Malaysia 370: How About Some Metadata?

March 24, 2014 Data

I groused a couple days ago about the mixed bag of “journalism” regarding the search for Malaysia Flight 370. In lieu of more speculation, the news coverage would be improved with more factual detail, e.g., more metadata. Here are a couple of examples data about the data that I would find useful: What are the […]

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To Better Understand, We Need Better News Coverage of Malaysia Flight 370

March 20, 2014 Analysis

A colleague and friend, knowing of my history flying large Air Force transports internationally, and who’s intensely curious about the fate of Malaysia Flight 370, has sent me a string of emails, most with the subject line: “does this make any sense?” My first response, and one which is still correct was this: “It is […]

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Useful Tool for Finding Nursing Home Performance Information

August 17, 2012 Health Care

Take a look here. ProPublica, a public interest journalism site, has a tool for identifying nursing homes by location and severity of deficiencies. It has free text capability as well. By way of example, the link is set for New York and the nursing homes with the worst deficiencies.

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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.

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What happened to newspapers?

July 12, 2011 Budget

Interesting article on what’s happened to the business model of newspapers at Virulent Word of Mouse. There’s a lot of discussion of the mechanics and technical developments that pulled advertising into Google’s world, including … And that’s despite the fact that Google was not selling ads at the beginning. A little later, Google invented one […]

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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.

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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