Institute for Analytic Journalism

Last week, NOAA predicated a serious hurricane season a'comin' in the Atlantic, which has implications for the entire U.S. East Coast. That's last week's news, but if one lives in California, Mexico, Central America or Japan, then today there's always the possibility of a major shaker. And those are just risks imposed by nature. Modeling these and other hazards of life is the mission of RMS, a fascinating California company demonstrating innovative thinking and analytic tools.

"RMS brings together a unique, multidisciplinary team of experts to create solutions for its clients’ natural hazard and financial risk management challenges. We are the technical leader in our market, with over 100 engineers and scientists devoted to the development of risk models. Of this number, approximately fifty percent hold advanced degrees in their field of expertise.

Our specialists track research among leading experts and academic institutions worldwide, and supplement this knowledge with internal R&D to ensure that our models provide the most complete and accurate quantification of risk."

Yup -- our kind of guys. Examples of the output of these "risk models" can be found here. Of special interest to U.S. journalists are the Catastrophe Risk maps. (They are a bit too small to read in detail, but big enough to get the gist of some of the RMS product.)

We hope to report more next week about RMS, how it does what it does and how there might be some synergy there for analytic journalists.

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Doing well by doing good

by JTJ on Thu 19 May 2005 03:50 PM MDT

Here at the IAJ we believe one of the reasons people come to newspapers or broadcast stations is to get the data which, upon analysis, they can turn into information that helps them make decisions. Ergo, the more meaningful data a journalistic institution can provide, the greater value that institution has for a community.

A good example arrived today thanks to Tara Calishain, creator of ResearchBuzz. She writes:
** Getcher Cheap Gas Prices on Google Maps
<http://www.researchbuzz.org/getcher_cheap_gas_prices_on_google_maps.shtml>

"Remember when I was saying that I would love a Gasbuddy / Google Maps mashups that showed cheap gas prices along a trip route? Turns out somebody has already done it -- well, sorta. You can specify a state, city (only selected cities are available) and whether you're looking for regular or diesel fuel. Check it out at http://www.ahding.com/cheapgas/ "

The data driving the map is ginned up by GasBuddy.com It's not clear how or why GasBuddy gets its data, but it offers some story potential for journalists and data for news researchers. It has an interesting link to dynamic graphs of gas prices over time.

Surely the promotion department of some news organization could grab onto this tool, tweak it a bit, promote the hell out of it, and drive some traffic to and build loyalty for the organization's web site.

That's the obvious angle, but what if some enterprising journo started to ask some questions of the data underlying the map? What's the range in gas prices in our town/state? (In Albuquerque today, the range was from $2.04 to $2.28.) Are there any demographic or traffic flow match-ups to that price range? How 'bout the variance by brand?

Would readers appreciate this sort of data? We think so, especially if there was an online sign-up and the news provider would deliver the changing price info via e-mail or IM much like Travelocity tells us when airline ticket prices change by TK dollars.

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