Institute for Analytic Journalism

GPS, mapping and Economic Development in your town

analyticjournalism — 2008-12-17T10:50:15-07:00

Colleague Owen Densmore points us to this page with these comments:

This use of gps may play a role in understanding economic development in any city by watching the flows within the city:
http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2008/12/gps-city-tracks-1-year-in-24-hours-via.html

This gets me to an aspect of ED I'm interested: MicroED. It comes from the observation that all cities' ED is unique. Think about every city you've lived in and you'll notice that each was unique. For me, Rochester NY: Kodak/Xerox company towns; Silicon Valley: A network of startups and established companies with a highly mobile social/skill network. Here in Santa Fe, we are similarly unique. ...

Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map

Tom Johnson — 2008-08-28T10:00:00-06:00
Brady Forrest, at O'Reilly's Radar, tips us to an interesting mash-up of Flickr, Open Street Map and the Burning Man festival. Why not use this idea for local festivals -- fairs, classic car rallies, an introduction to a new shopping center?
Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map

Posted: 26 Aug 2008 07:38 PM CDT

Flickr is best known for its photo-sharing, but increasingly its most innovative work is coming from its geo-developers (Radar post). Yesterday they announced the addition of a street-level map of Black Rock City so that we can view geotagged Burning Man photos. Flickr got the mapping data via Open Street Map's collaboration with Burning Man.

Flickr uses Yahoo! Maps for most of their mapping (and fine maps they are). The underlying data for them is primarily provided by NAVTEQ. NAVTEQ's process can take months to update their customers' mapping data servers. For a city like Burning Man that only exists for a week every year that process won't work. However, an open data project like Open Street Map can map that type of city. To the right you can see what Yahoo's map currently looks like.
This isn't the first time Flickr has used OSM's data. They also used it to supplement their maps in time for the Beijing Olympics. I wonder if Yahoo! Maps will consider using OSM data so that their sister site doesn't continue to outshine them (view Beijing on Yahoo Maps vs. Flickr's Map to see what I mean). OSM's data is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.
In other geo-Flickr news they have added KML and GeoRSS to their API. This means that you can subscribe to Flickr API calls in your feed reader or Google Earth. (Thanks for the tip on this Niall)
If you want to get more insight into Flickr's geo-thinking watch their talk from the Where 2.0 2008
conference after the jump.

Putting Open Source tools to work for community reporting

Tom Johnson — 2008-06-13T13:20:45-06:00

The phrases "community journalism" and "convergence journalism" have been around for decades (in the case of the former) and at least 10 years in the case of the latter. For a long time, "community journalism" referred to the publishing of "...a small daily, 20,000 or less, or maybe a larger weekly or twice- or thrice-weekly." And "convergence" most often talked about using various print and Audio/Visual media to deliver the same old reportorial product of traditional newspapers and broadcast.

Finally, some are starting to see that the real and much-needed "convergence" has to be implemented on the front-end of the reportorial process. Paul Niwa, at Emerson College, has done just that with some graduate students who created bostonchinatown.org. And we are grateful to Niwa for writing a "how and why we did it" piece for the current issue of the Convergence Newsletter.

Here's Niwa's lede, but do check out the entire piece:

"Community Embraces a Converged Journalism-Sourcing Project

By Paul Niwa, Emerson College

Boston’s Chinatown is one of the largest and oldest Asian American neighborhoods in the country. Yet, this community of 40,000 does not even have a weekly newspaper. Coverage of the neighborhood in the city’s metropolitan dailies is also weak. In 2006, The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald mentioned Chinatown in 78 articles. Only 16 percent of the sources quoted in those articles were Asian American, indicating that newspapers relied on information from non-residents to cover the neighborhood. With all this in mind, I created the bostonchinatown.org project as an experiment to build a common sourcebook for newsrooms."

More on the SoCal fire coverage

Tom Johnson — 2007-10-24T18:41:47-06:00

This comes from the Poynter blog.....

Posted by Amy Gahran 5:42:13 PM

CA Wildfire Coverage: Intriguing Online Approaches

twitter.com

KPBS San Diego is offering fire news updates via Twitter -- possibly the best use of this service I've ever seen.

While much of Southern California burns, online news staffs and citizen journalists definitely aren't fiddling around. Here's a quick roundup of some of the more intriguing efforts:

KPBS, the NPR affiliate in San Diego, offers updates on Twitter. This is probably the best use I've ever seen for Twitter. It's simple to subscribe to get the updates by cell, or check them on the Web. Undoubtedly useful for evacuees whose only contact with the outside world right now might be their cell phones.

More from KPBS. The station has also put together a Google Map of the fire area that's more sophisticated than what the LA Times offers. Note the variety of icons and information types, the highway and train closures, the burn area demarcation, and the map legend. (Click the yellow pin to see the legend.)

And Still I Persist This blog written by three San Diego-area information technology professionals normally covers an eclectic range of topics, but currently is publishing considerable citizen journalism and other information about the wildfires around San Diego.

Barboni.org, a personal weblog started by a resident of San Marcos, Calif. (north of San Diego), features another kind of map -- Google Earth overlaid with data from the U.S Forest Service and other sources.

Help in San Diego This assistance-oriented blog, very reminiscent of NOLA.com during Hurricane Katrina, was set up by the San Diego Union Tribune site SignOn San Diego. It's just a simple Blogspot blog -- which shows that if you don't have the in-house tools to do something important online fast, don't hesitate to use an available service. Tools should never limit your journalistic choices.

Housley in the House. This blog, by Los Angeles-based FOX News TV correspondent Adam Housley, is currently featuring frequent updates from the field and raw video footage of the fires and evacuations.

NowPublic's "Emergencies" section is offering a steady stream of citizen journalism, photography, and other kinds of "crowd-powered news" from and about the affected regions. I found this inquiry under the "news wanted" section intriguing.

PR Newswire has created a special page of current press releases from businesses, governments, nonprofits and other organizations. Jonathan Evans of PR Newswire said this is "a service we're providing for free to those needing to send out announcements."

Flickr group, The Southern California Fires 2007 currently has 169 members and over 1500 images. Not all of these photos are great, but there's an amazing diversity of subject matter, communities, and views represented.

What kinds of innovative online coverage of the fires are you seeing today? Please comment below.

(Thanks to the members of Poynter's Online News discussion group for tips to some of the items above.)

Impact of feedback in mass media message.

JTJ — 2007-06-30T17:38:42-06:00
A recent article worth a look over by the journalism community. What we do DOES have impact.
Juan Carlos González-Avella, Mario G. Cosenza, Konstantin Klemm, Víctor M. Eguíluz and Maxi San Miguel (2007)
"Information Feedback and Mass Media Effects in Cultural Dynamics"
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 10, no. 3 9
PDF at http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/10/3/9.html
Received: 11-Jan-2007 Accepted: 18-May-2007 Published: 30-Jun-2007
________________________________
Abstract
We study the effects of different forms of information feedback associated with mass media on an agent-agent based model of the dynamics of cultural dissemination. In addition to some processes previously considered, we ...

Some imaginative election "gaming" from USC and the Annenburg Center

JTJ — 2007-06-19T15:18:47-06:00
From All Points Blog

Monday, June 18. 2007

The Redistricting Game

University of Southern California students developed the online game for the Annenburg Center for Communications to teach about the challenges (and partisanness) of redistricting. Along the way players learn that to keep their candidates elected they may need to examine ethical issues. The game is Flash-based.

From the [original News 10] site: The Redistricting Game is designed to educate, engage, and empower citizens around the issue of political redistricting. Currently, the political system in most states allows the state legislators themselves to draw the lines. This system is subject to a wide range of abuses and manipulations that encourage incumbents to draw districts which protect their seats rather than risk an open contest.

A semi- "by the numbers" tutorial on data visualization

JTJ — 2007-02-13T17:55:48-07:00
Juan C. Dürsteler, in Barcelona, Spain, edits a fine online magazine devoted to information graphics. The current issue describes "... the diagram for the process of Information Visualisation as seen by Yuri Engelhardt and the author after a series of discussions about its nature and the process that leads from Data to Understanding."

And it is available in English and Spanish. Check out
http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=187&lang=2

Something less than half a measure

JTJ — 2006-10-17T12:36:49-06:00
A brief comment was passed along on the NICAR-L (National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting) listserv this morning by Daniel Lathrop, of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Said he:

Really interesting story on lobbyists-related-to-lawmakers in The USA Today. I think those of us who cover money-in-politics should all have a little story envy on this one.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-16-lobbyist-family-cover_x.htm

Daniel Lathrop
Seattle P-I

Well, yeah. An interesting story, but also one demonstrating why newspapers as institutions simply do not grasp the shift in power inherent in the Digital Age, a shift away from institutions and to citizens.

First, the story reports: "The family connections between lobbying and lawmaking are prompting complaints that Congress is not doing enough to police itself." Fair enough, but can't you SHOW us, in the online version, the evidence to support this sweeping generalization of "prompting complaints." Why should we take your word for it, guys, when the evidence must be at hand.

Second, "...USA TODAY reviewed thousands of pages of financial disclosures and lobbyist registrations, property records, marriage announcements and other public documents to identify which lawmakers and staffers had relatives in the lobbying business." WOW! Would I like to see those pages, and even drill down into them to see if there's anything there related to my representative. But nooooooooo. The paper must of had some way to manage all this public-record data, some way to cross-reference it, to search it, to retrieve documents and content. Why not put all that up on the web and let readers peruse their own subjects of interest?

Ironically, an example of the power shift mentioned above turns up, buried in a sidebar to the story, "Little Accountability in Earmarks." There we find reference to something called the Sunlight Foundation. I had not heard of the Sunlight Foundation, but, hey, it's only been around since the first of the year. It turns out this organization is doing just what newspapers should be doing: leveraging the power of the digital environment to connect people to the data and tools needed to analyze that data so they can make informed decisions.

Another opportunity missed by the industry, and tragically so.

Using GIS to increase tax revenues

JTJ — 2006-08-20T21:46:53-06:00
An interesting piece in the NYTimes on Sunday, "Finding Tax Revenue Through Aerial Imaging," highlights yet another industry and example of how public administrators are using GIS, in this case to increase the revenue stream. We think that if journalists are not hip to these tools, then they cannot ask the right questions of the public's administrators.

"...Until recently, assessors had to accept homeowners’ claims or visit the properties themselves. But in 2003, the city hired the Pictometry International Corporation, a company in Rochester, N.Y., to provide images of every building in the city.
Once a year, Pictometry flies a Cessna 172 over Philadelphia, taking thousands of black-and-white photographs. The low-altitude shots, unlike satellite images, show buildings at about a 40-degree angle. Pictometry’s computers organize the photos so they can be searched by address. Nearly 200 employees in Mr. Mescolotto’s office have the software on their computers.
Pictometry isn’t the only company offering aerial photos to assessors, but it has won adherents in more than 200 cities and counties, according to Dante Pennacchia, Pictometry’s chief marketing officer. Its competitors include an Israeli company, Ofek International, working with Aerial Cartographics of America, based in Orlando, Fla...."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/realestate/20nati.html

A hint of things to come

JTJ — 2006-03-02T12:10:38-07:00
We tend to comment more on analytic methods than news delivery techniques, but today we offer an interesting example of the latter. Ifra, the European-based newspaper training -- and R&D -- organization, publishes something called newspaper techniques ePaper. It is published IoP (ink-on-paper), but there is also an online version. Check it out at the link below. It is easier to read if you have a tablet PC with a vertical/portrait display mode. (Someday, every screen will have an easy-to-rotate mode, we hope.) Still, the quality of the delivered package here is better than anything we've seen coming out of the North American media or media association efforts.

"Dear media professional,

Newspaper techniques is now also available in a state-of-the-art
digital version!

Try it free this month at http://www.ifra-nt.com/epaper_nt .

nt ePaper is one-for-one the same as the paper edition -- same
content, same presentation, same impact. Its advanced technology
leverages the familiar and effective page-turning reading
experience, enhanced with embedded links to the rich content of
newspaper techniques' microsites at http://ifra-nt.com.

-- Special introductory offer: Subscribe to the newspaper techniques
ePaper edition for the rest of 2006 for just 54 Euros.

E-mail mailto:subscriptions@ifra.com for information.

Regards,
The Ifra Publications team
http://www.ifra-nt.com/epaper_nt "