A few months ago we challenged designers to illustrate our report examining how tablet computers are changing the news business. Congratulations to our three winners, whose infographics are published on the visual.ly blog.
Crowdsourcing campaign spending: What ProPublica learned from Free the Files
We started Free the Files as we do with any major data project — asking ourselves what story we wanted to tell (how dark money spending was impacting the election) and what information we had available to tell it (thousands of PDF files).
But turning the files into something reportable would require manual review of each document, a crowdsourcing challenge compounded by the fact that we had no idea exactly how many files we would be dealing with. Every day volunteers reviewed hundreds of files, and every day we downloaded hundreds more from the FCC web site. It was like starting a race without knowing when you’d hit the finish line.
Read how ProPublica made Free the Files successful, how they tracked the project, and how they made it fun on Nieman Journalism Lab.
Here’s a (still getting tweaked) R tutorial for the charts in the last post. Here’s the data you’ll need to download.
Set your working directory to wherever you want to work out of (usually a project folder)
setwd("/Users/pathToMyFolder...")Next, load the data. Any format is fine, but our…
Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the New York Times, gave a great presentation at ONACamp Minnesota last weekend. He’s pulled together these useful notes so you too can build charts like a champ.
More resources from ONACamp Minnesota coming soon.
The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project has announced their newest group of fellows. Joshua Benton spells out why the project exists:
In the United States, at least, there’s a surplus of people who want to make phone calls, ask questions, and write stories. There are more reporters than jobs for reporters, and each new j-school graduating class tips the balance a bit further.
But when it comes to news developers — technologists who build journalistic products through code — the scales tip in the other direction. Newsrooms hunt hard to find candidates who have the digital skills and the journalistic instincts to build interactives, open up databases, and innovate in digital presentation. Newsrooms aren’t often on developers’ radars, and great jobs go unfilled.
This year, the fellowship expanded, offering eight Knight-Mozilla fellowships and partnering with more news organizations. Fellows will now join The New York Times, La Nacíon (Argentina), Spiegel Online, and ProPublica, in addition to BBC, The Guardian, Zeit Online, and The Boston Globe, who hosted fellows in 2012.
Interested in the OpenNews project? Follow along over at Daniel Sinker’s Tumblr.
The [New York] Times does not release traffic figures, but a spokesperson said yesterday that [Nate] Silver’s blog provided a significant—and significantly growing, over the past year—percentage of Times pageviews. This fall, visits to the Times’ political coverage (including FiveThirtyEight) have increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of site visits. But FiveThirtyEight’s growth is staggering: where earlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of politics visits included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent.
But Silver’s blog has buoyed more than just the politics coverage, becoming a signifiant traffic-driver for the site as a whole. Earlier this year, approximately 1 percent of visits to the New York Times included FiveThirtyEight. Last week, that number was 13 percent. Yesterday, it was 20 percent. That is, one in five visitors to the sixth-most-trafficked U.S. news site took a look at Silver’s blog.
Marc Tracy, The New Republic. Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times.
Takeaway: Stat nerds have clout.
(via futurejournalismproject)
ONA issues: Data News, the team working with open data at WNYC, created a number of important open-source tools during Hurricane Sandy, which identified the path of the storm, areas that were affected by flooding, the status of the subway and other modes of public transportation and other issues. John Keefe, Data News editor at WNYC and member of the ONA Board of Directors, showcases the tools they built and how they predicted what the team should focus on to be most useful to those watching the storm.
With hurricane Sandy churning far off the Florida coast, we began anticipating questions people would have around the storm. And then we tried to code answers to those questions as fast as we could.
In order, those questions turned out to be:
Where’s the storm forecast to go? For this, we dusted off our Hurricane Tracker, built for hurricane Irene, and fed it with the National Weather Service data for Sandy. As with almost all of our work, we made it free and easy to embed, and many news outlets did.
What zone am I in? Again, we dusted off something made for Irene — our NYC Evacuation Zone Map. We updated it with better colors and areas newly designated as Zone A. We also published a project I’d been working on since Irene: a Storm Surge Map of the entire New York and New Jersey coastline.
Where’s the storm now? As the storm…
Today we posted a new map to show the rights for same-sex couples across the US:
Louise Ma’s design really jumps out, and I like the way it works interactively.
We wrestled with this a lot — and were inspired by the great gay rights data visualization by Feilding Cage and the…
ONA Issues: Beautifully done interactive map from WNYC, as part of their #30issues series. It’s free and embeddable- a perfect starting point to a conversation on gay rights with your audience.
Data journalism is huge. I don’t mean ‘huge’ as in fashionable - although it has become that in recent months - but ‘huge’ as in ‘incomprehensibly enormous’. It represents the convergence of a number of fields which are significant in their own right - from investigative research and statistics to design and programming. The idea of combining those skills to tell important stories is powerful - but also intimidating. Who can do all that?
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