A few things I haven’t had time yet to dig deeper on, but maybe you will:
- Eric Ulken offers of 10 pieces of advice at OJR, based on his experience building the data desk at the LA Times:
“4. Go off the reservation: No matter how good your IT department is, their priorities are unlikely to be in sync with yours. They’re thinking big-picture product roadmaps with lots of moving pieces. Good luck fitting your database of dog names (oh yes, we did one of those) into their pipeline. Early on, database producer Ben Welsh set up a Django box at projects.latimes.com, where many of the Times’ interactive projects live. There are other great solutions besides Django, including Ruby on Rails (the framework that powers the Times’ articles and topics pages and many of the great data projects produced by The New York Times) and PHP (an inline scripting language so simple even I managed to learn it). Some people (including the L.A. Times, occasionally) are using Caspio to create and host data apps, sans programming. I am not a fan, for reasons Derek Willis sums up much better than I could, but if you have no other options, it’s better than sitting on your hands.”
- Meanwhile, over at the increasingly useful Nieman Journalism Lab, Zach Seward rounds up some of the potential benefits — and minor controversies — built into the New York Times / ProPublica joint Knight News Challenge application:
“To get a sense of DocumentCloud’s potential, take a look at the database of Guantánamo Bay detainees that the Times made public on Nov. 3, when it was accompanied by a 1,500-word story. Each record is linked to relevant government documents that have been made public since ‘enemy combatants’ were first held there in 2002. Pilhofer said the database isn’t using a full-featured version of DocViewer, but it certainly demonstrates the benefit of browsing documents grouped by subject rather than, say, the order in which the Defense Department happened to release them. What’s remarkable about the Gitmo collection, aside from its massive scope, is that the Times has offered up this information at all. As Pilhofer said, ‘It’s not usually in a newsroom’s DNA to release something like that to the public — and not just the public, the competition, too.’”
- And since I stopped compulsively refreshing FiveThirtyEight.com at 11 p.m. EST on Nov. 4th, this link to Nate Silver’s analysis of how major news sites have fared since that moment when I ramped down my political news intake came via the Nieman J-Lab as well. Hard to pull a blockquote out of Nate’s post, but you should click through just to see the numbers. Drudge and HuffPo have definitely seen a post-election bounce, while Fox News, Daily Kos, and Politico are all down.