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Wednesday, December 21
Getting at private company activity
by
JTJ
on Wed 21 Dec 2005 06:02 PM MST
Tamara Thompson provides yet another good pointer:
By Tamara Thompson Investigations
Finding documentation on a
private business may take a little more digging than uncovering
background on a publicly traded company. One of the resources you may
have overlooked is the Small Business Administration
database
of companies to which they've made loans. The returns can include
the gross receipts of the business, number of employees and owners.The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) produces a monthly report of its
litigation with companies
. The online site doesn't have a database but you can quickly
create one using Google, giving you an on-the-spot search by keyword of
all the posted monthly reports. At the Google search box enter the name
of the company, followed by the site to be searched. If the business
name is "Amycel", your search would be formulated like this:amycel site:http://www.eeoc.gov/litigation/settlements/ The Google result will return all pages in the litigation monthly
reports that mention Amycel. Unfortunately, the online reports only
cover those issued since December 2002.
Tuesday, December 20
Another redesign of "Thomas"
by
JTJ
on Tue 20 Dec 2005 02:05 PM MST
The LLRX newsletter reports:
Old
and New
THOMAS, the legislative Web site from the
Library of Congress, has received its second facelift in the space of a year.
(For information on the previous set of tweaks, see my January 2005 column
THOMAS: New Congress, A Few
Changes.) The latest redesign, announced in a November 2005
press release, does
not add much substantial content or functionality but gives THOMAS an updated
look similar to the main Library of Congress web
site and a consistent site-wide navigation scheme that certainly was needed.
Wednesday, December 14
A GoogleMaps-FundRace MashUp
by
JTJ
on Wed 14 Dec 2005 11:40 AM MST
Gerry Lanosga, an investigative producer at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, was kind enough to send along this link -- http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~markane/i590/contributors.html to a nifty first shot at merging GoogleMaps with The Fundrace Project., that site that shows you who in any ZIP Code made contributions to which politicians. Matthew Kane, a CS student at the Univ. of Indiana, put this together, and it's a fine beginning. Be alert, however, that the Fundrace data is not always correct. For example, we know a guy named John T. Johnson, who lives in ZIP 87505, fairly well. The Fundrace Project says he is an airline pilot who works for UPS. We know for sure that is not the case.
The drill-down on Kane's
Following the Dollars doesn't give the degree of detail that the Fundrace Project does itself, but keep on truckin', Mr. Kane. We need all of these utilities we can get.
Tuesday, December 6
Resources related to Crime Mapping
by
Tom Johnson
on Tue 06 Dec 2005 08:04 PM MST
We
don't know if there has as yet been any empirical research done on how
interested media consumers are in online crime mapping -- and how good the coverage is -- but there is a body of
literature debating readers' interest in crime per se. It would
seem to be a pretty good bet, though, that if people are interested in
crime AND if more and more are going online via broadband, that
some dynamic crime maps would get some hits.
Remember
that crime mapping is not just about pushing digital push-pins on a
map, GoogleMap or otherwise. "Journey to Crime" maps or maps
showing where a car was stolen and when it was recovered can provide
interesting insights.
Here are some links recently posted to the CrimeMapping listserv that could be of value to journalists:
Journey-after-crime: How Far and to Which Direction DO They Go?
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/boston2004/papers/Lu.ppt
Linking Offender Residence Probability Surfaces to a Specific Incident Location
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/dallas2001/Gore.doc
Journey to Crime Estimation
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/CRIMESTAT/files/CrimeStatChapter.10.pdf
Applications for Examining the Journey-to-Crime Using Incident-Based Offender Residence Probability Surfaces
http://pqx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/7/4/457
The Geography of Transit Crime:
http://www.uctc.net/papers/550.pdf
See, too: Paulsen, Derek J. "WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF HOMICIDE IN SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTING DANGEROUS PLACES." Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 9(3) (2002) 113-127
Monday, December 5
Indirect indicators. Or maybe not.
by
Tom Johnson
on Mon 05 Dec 2005 04:20 PM MST
Sometimes
journalists have a tendency to be too literal. We want to ask a
question and we want the response to be a quote that is without
ambiguity. One that's fills in some of the space between our
anecdotes. But other times, we need tools that work like a
periscope, a device that allows us to not look at the object directly
but through a helpful lens. Such periscopes for analyzing the
economy are indirect indicators.
Monday's
(5 Dec. 2005) NYTimes' Business Section was loaded with references to
such indicators that journos could keep in mind when looking for
devices to show and explain what's happening. Check out "What's Ahead: Blue Skies, or More Forecasts of Them?" Be sure to click on the link "Graphic: Indicators From Everyday Life"
Another indirector was mentined Sunday on National Public Radio in "Economic Signs Remain Strong" There, an economist said he tracks changes in the "titanium dioxide" data, the compound is used in all white paint and reflects manufacturing production.
Tilling the soil makes for fertile crops, Congressionally speaking.
by
Tom Johnson
on Mon 05 Dec 2005 11:42 AM MST
Kudos to Derek Willis and Adrian Holovaty of The Washington Post for the Washingtonpost.com site "U.S. Congress Votes Database." One element we find of recent and special interest is the "late night votes"
variables for both the House and Senate. With a little more
probing and data slicing and dicing, it would make an interesting bit
of visual
statistics/infographics to do a longitudinal comparison of the time of
votes in various congresses.
This site/searchable database is a fine example of how investing in some basic data preparation
can create the potential for a ton of stories. Why, for example, do
Democrats have such a preponderance (18 out of 20) of Representatives on the "missed
votes" list, but only 9 out of 20 on the similar list for the Senate?
This is
also a fine example of how a newspaper can do good things for itself
while doing good things for the community and readers. This
database gives the WP reporters and editors a quick look-up of
Congressional activity, the kind of fact and detail that can enrich a
story. At the same time, citizens can turn to this value-added
form of the public record to answer their own questions.
Derek Willis wrote to the news librarians listserv:
"Folks,
It's not part of a story or series, but the Post today launched a site
that may prove useful to your newsrooms or even as an inspiration to
learn Python: a congressional votes database that covers the
102nd-109th congresses (1991-present). Currently browsable, we're
working on adding a search engine and other features to it. Adrian
Holovaty, who works for washingtonpost.com, and I assembled the data
and he built the web framework to display it. All of the data is
gathered using Python, the database backend is PostgreSQL and the web
framework is Django."
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