Livestream for TedxPoynter -- talks about journalism's future

There will be a livestream for TedxPoynter, so even if you’re not here in St. Petersburg, FL, you can still hear all the great talks live.  Check it out here tomorrow on Friday, June 1.  

(Psst!  I will be talking at 3 EST!)

My friend Kwan Booth asked if there was a version of my Startups for Journalists presentation that had audio.  This is the one!

…there’s Learncodefor.journalismwith.me, but signups are (already?) closed.  

See also: “The Kind of Programming Journalism Needs (Is Simple).”

The Overview Project

pdxiii:

Overview is a great tool for mining complex documents.

Indeed it is, and it’s nice to see people picking up on it.  

LIKE: Satirical Knight News Challenge applications

This makes me want to create satirical News Challenge entries, and inspiring is good, right?

Also I want to buy this applicant a beer. 

newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Richard Schiff stands at the intersection of news, media, networks and the future. He will unlock the answers, whatever they might be. 

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

Richard Schiff has been underutilized as a source of information in these turbulent times. It’s time to change that. 

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work. [50 words]

Richard Schiff, also known as Toby Zeigler on the West Wing, usually gives great advice to President Bartlett. As such, he is a proven force for good, justice, and the future of media. 

4. Why will it work? [100 words]

I have no idea if it will work or not, but I am placing my blind faith that Richard Schiff will know what to do. He always has something interesting to say. 

5. Who is working on it? [100 words]

Richard Schiff is not involved with this project. Yet. 

6. What part of the project have you already built? [100 words]

I have called Richard Schiff, but so far he has not replied. 

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires? [50 words]

Will move to other sources of information, starting with John Corbett.

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $783
Expected amount of time required to complete project: One Week
Total Project Cost: $784

(Source: newschallenge1)

The Investigative News Network receives non-profit status from IRS | Investigative News Network | INN

GREAT NEWS!!!

(via susanmernit)

This is indeed, good news. 

Computer programing is a vast domain, stretching from embedded systems that end up being the brain of your refrigerator to vastly sophisticated algorithms that let Wall Street traders defraud the public detect and capitalize on trends.

The good news for people who want to learn how to program for journalistic or civic purposes is this: A lot of what we need to do to create code in the public interest is not rocket science.

Now, there are notable exceptions; Jonathan Stray’s Overview project at AP takes the massive document dumps that are rapidly becoming a feature of the journalism in our time and turns them into sophisticated topical maps that give us a near instant sense of what the connections represented by those documents are. In the process of making the data catalog system and “newsroom data appliance” PANDA, Brian Boyer and his team at the Chicago Tribune make acute design decisions that shape how data is stored and shared. Aron Pilhofer and many others at the New York Times design APIs that let data from the Times flow across the web (check out the Times team’s code on Github). Most of the people I just listed have years if not decades of experience as programmers, and many (all?) have computer science degrees.

But allow me to get back to the good news: there are tons of things you can do to code in the public interest that you can achieve as a relative novice. But where should you start? Here are a few ideas for areas of focus that can prove particularly fruitful for you if you want to hack news or cities:

• Scrape it.  Lo, gaze ye upon the many data points…and sigh when you realize they’re in crappy PDFs or secreted away on horrible, difficult-to-navigate websites. What’s an aspiring newshacker to do?  Learn to scrape!  Scraping is the process of writing scripts that look at an electronic document or web page, extract the data you want to use, and deliver it in a format that you can use.   Start by checking out Scraperwiki and Michelle Minkoff’s NICAR “Scraping without programming” tutorials. 
• Map it. MapBox, TileMill, OpenStreetMap, Grassroots Mapping, and the venerable (if aging and soon to be for-pay) Google Maps — mapping is at the center of a kind of developmental wildfire that’s only getting hotter.  Learning how to leverage these tools with relatively simple scripts can result in powerful output.  Not to mention the cool eye candy. 
• Grab it. Mashable now has thousands of APIs in its catalogue — that’s thousands of sites with everything from voting data to restaurant reviews waiting for you to write a fairly simple script to do something clever with it.  

So if you want to make an impact, don’t be discouraged — you’re closer than you think. 

Life and Code covers data journalism and publishes how-to resources about programming for journalism and the civic good.  Follow us at http://lifeandcode.tumblr.com.

Big data and the end of theory?

Reminds me of the SparkCamp haiku by way of Jonathan Stray:

Do not guess; count it
And if you cannot count it
Say you are guessing.  

(Source: sunfoundation)