Data journalism: Cool site on counties' economic recovery

The National Association of Counties has put out a cool site that looks at economic indicators for every county throughout the country, and the picture is not great -- aside from the great oil swath in the middle of the country.

Click on the counties in your area. This definitely could lend itself to more reporting.
More from Governing Magazine.

Journalism Education: If you teach reporting, especially public affairs, you must download this financial guide

If you teach public affairs reporting -- or are a journalist who has to deal with local government -- you really should download Governing magazine's "A Public Official's Guide to Financial Literacy."

Fantastic teaching tool.

Plain English.

Any guide that gives your students (or you) a fighting chance of understanding GO vs. the types of revenue bonds; or cash, accrual and modified accrual accounting (gotta know that to be able to read the financials) is worth every minute you spend with it (and that won't be many because it's only 34 easy-to-digest pages).

(I should warn you, you will be asked for copious info (name, phone, employer) as many of these marketing things do. But I can say without hesitation that I have never been spammed by Governing. I get an occasional entreaty to a conference, but that is minor at best in return for a free subscription to the magazine and access to things like this. (Personally, I think every reporter or editor covering the city or county should be getting a copy of Governing or at least its daily email of top stories.) )

Awesome tool for Mac users

I've fallen in love with XtraFinder, an app for Macs that gives "finder" file windows the same tabbed windows feature available in browsers.

Now, instead of having multiple windows open, I can just have one split one (one of the features), for instance, as shown below. Or I can have numerous tabs open in just one window, taking up a lot less real estate and improving my workflow tremendously.

If you are a journalist using a Mac, this will definitely help you keep things organized and speed up your ability to flip among things.

Thank you Tran Ky Nam.

Here, by the way, is a pretty complete tutorial on how to speed up workflow using a lot of Finder options (as well as some alternatives to XtraFinder).

Bradshaw's data scraping how-to

Paul Bradshaw, one of the people I admire among the future-of-journalism foks, has written an ebook primer on data scraping for journalists.

I'm going to give it a go for $10.99.

Even though my early background was in programming, and I've played with scraping on and off, I think Bradshaw's got a point in an accompanying blog post detailing the barriers journalists trying to learn this stuff run into.

I'll let you know how it goes, but for $10.99, I'd seriously consider giving it a flier yourself.

Liquid Text, file this under WOW

Pointer from Jack Lail to a project coming out of Georgia Tech called Liquid Text.

Can you imagine how this could change journalists' ability to extract and organize info?

Jtools: Trunk.ly to save links

I've been playing around today with trunk.ly, a new free site that will fetch your links from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and save them for you.

I'm kind of liking it as a way to stay organized and find stuff I've forgotten about. You can import a bookmark file too.

Try it and let me know what you think of it.

Reporter resources - Cool site: StatSpotting

Just came across StatSpotting, an intriguing site that scrapes the Web for some of the most intriguing statistics of the day.

Nothing I'd take to the bank, especially given the gauzy nature of who's behind it,* but certainly a place that seems useful to find out what kind of stats are bouncing around online for possible story ideas.

For instance, here's what's being featured today:

I've added the RSS feed to my reader.

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*The site says it's run by "NP Labs," but that goes to a dead link. Its "whois" lists an outfit in Bangalore called Numbers Plus, but that site is just a GoDaddy container. So as with all things Web, caveat emptor, but then again you should just be using this for ideas anyhow, right?

Reporting Resource: Governors Journal

Got the pointer from J-Lab ...

Governor's Journal is all about the nation's governors.

It's edited out of a PR agency in D.C., but from what I've seen, it's pretty straight-up stuff, and at least the transparency level of who's behind it is high. Worthy of adding to your feeds.

New Twitter tutorial for journalists

The new tutorial is  from the Knight Digital Media Center, and it's pretty cool.

I recommend checking it out.

Tax time for journalists

CCH, the venerable publisher of those thick tomes explaining tax law (and many of the other arcane corners where government and commerce intersect), has its 2011 tax site up - the Whole Ball of Tax.

It has some good stuff, including various data sources that may be useful for reporters working on tax-related stories (and that may even be useful for some other stories).

As a bonus, at the bottom of the page there is a PDF link to a tax guide for journalists.

Happy hunting - for those deductions.

Internet stats resource?

Came across this set of Internet statistics from an outfit called Pingdom, a website monitoring service.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers

Take it FWIW, but at least this outfit does list its sources at the bottom, so A+ for transparency.

Pointer from Resource Shelf.

Reporting, editing resource: County boundaries atlas

The Newberry Library has online a digital atlas of county boundaries in every state from 1634 (if your state goes back that far) to 2000.

Thanks to Research Buzz for the pointer.

Useful Resource - technical glossary

Ever need to know what 1080p vs. 720p really meant? Or 3GPP or M4V? (Don't say no - as journalists these days, we are more likely than even to encounter these tech terms - or have to actually produce in some of them.)

In my wanderings I came across a useful resource, a tech glossary from afterdawn.com. There are some others out there, but this is one of the better ones. Most of the definitions are simplified enough that, even with a few tech-talk spots, you can work your way through them, and the site internally links to lots of other guides.

Tech Tip: Bitly click through stats

Hadn't realized this until I saw it in a comment, but adding a "+" to the end of a bit.ly link gives you the click-through stats on that link.

Check it:
http://bit.ly/hagapx+

Useful Resource - American Medical Association Archive

From Research Buzz: The American Medical Association has opened access to American Medical News.

There are about 15,000 articles, and the AMA (unlike some publishers) is welcoming links to them.

Journalists turn to social media sites for stories

A survey by Cision and Don Bates of George Washington University finds journalists, especially those at online sites, turning increasingly to social media sites for story ideas. That includes blogs.

MediaPost story.

Survey results.

Useful site - sports calendar

In this morning's e-mail was a pointer to what looks like it could be a really useful resource, an international sports calendar on the International Olympic Committee site.

Right now it goes back as far as 2002 (settle some bar bets?) and as far ahead as 2013 (plan that TV watching schedule?)

Thanks for the pointer to Resource Shelf.

AEJMC09: Covering Poverty

A session I am at is dealing with help for rural journalists covering their communities.

One interesting project is at the University of Georgia. Faculty member John Greenman says surveys show editors in persistently poor counties value the poor less. Poverty also is not mentioned when asked to name five factors that contributed to sense of place.

UGA has put together a site to help: http://www.grady.uga.edu/poverty/

The site is still being built, but it's worth a look. Greenman says UGA eventually hopes to move it over to a journalism training site, like NewsU.

At a later session, I learned of another resource, http://onpoverty.org/ at Washington and Lee University. That site also is being rebuilt.

Police scanners online

Yet another tool: Shoutcast has eight pages of police scanner channels you can monitor.

Journalism: Learning from Obama

Adam Tinworth is hosting this month's Carnival of Journalism, with the question on the table: What can the news media learn from the Obama multimedia campaign?

Contributors so far have some excellent points on how to use the lessons to reach audience and to incorporate your audience into your journalism.

But I want to take a little different tack, to suggest that from the reporting side there are some other lessons to be learned, too, the most important of which is that reporting may never be the same.

Not to overstate the case, but the government, in all its forms, has been building a technological capacity far greater than the news media's for at least a decade. Obama's crew, I think, will finally understand how to use that technology to effectively bypass journalists and journalism. (Think of how that much-vaunted e-mail and text-messaging list could be used to effectively blunt the impact of any negative news. Start by simply releasing the news using these channels while the journos are tied up in the news conference.)

The additional potential dark side is that in this age when information is being vaporized into bits and bytes, it's a lot easier to have things get lost in the digital soup.

Journalists, and newsrooms, for all their vaunted video, audio and multimedia technology, remain largely in a paper-and-pencil age when it comes to news development and gathering. In some respects, this may not change -- journalism in many cases ultimately will come down to one journalist's relationship with one source.

But in other respects, it must, if journalists are going to be able to pluck the valuable out of that digital soup.

Why am I concerned? Because as I have gone around making a presentation on how to use new digital tools to stay connected, the response in some newsrooms and at conferences has been tepid at best in many cases and downright hostile in others (along the lines of how am I supposed to do my job with all this, to which I often have wanted to respond, this is going to be your job, dammit). Sure, there are many good examples of digitally savvy journalists -- and several projects designed to help, such as Spot.us, newassignment.net and the controversial proposal by the New York Times and ProPublica for $1 million of Knight money to put thousands of "foundation documents" online. But there also are too many reactions like the above. So some suggestions:

• Learn what crowdsourcing is, how to manage it and how to use it. Understand Twitter and how it is a newsgathering as well as a distribution tool. It will be critical in coming years to have multiple sets of eyeballs -- and brains -- helping you out and tipping you off. Learn how to harness the power. (In other words, see social networks not just as a place to sell your wares, but as a vital place to help find the information you need.)
  
• Have some alacrity with Excel or another spreadsheet program. Know how to extract data from PDFs (a common tactic in some government agencies these days in an attempt to lock up the data so it can't be analyzed). If you are a bit more adventurous, learn how databases are constructed and how to get data out of them.
  
• But more important, know what to ask for. Think digitally, not ink on paper. (That mode of thinking is one of the best lessons journalists can take away from the Obama campaign.)
• Understand what the semantic Web is and why it is important to you. (Hint: If everything is machine readable and linkable then someday you are going to find yourself needing to use these tools to track down information.)
• Learn a bit about mapping and geocoding, not so much to present information but to learn how to get it. Again, much good information is in government files of this type, and even more so will be in the future.
• And, of course, learn how to use RSS feeds and feed readers and similar resources to save yourself time and extend your reach.

Now, all we have to do in journalism schools is figure out how to teach all this.