Chrys Wu has compiled an extensive list of “tools, slides and links” taken from the CAR conference held in St Louis earlier this month. The collection of presentations and the tools featured in them cover topics such as scraping, mapping and other data visualisations.

Hatip to the 10,000 Words blog for flagging up Wu’s post – the blog also has its own round-up of the topics covered at the event.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to deal with email overload
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – apps and tools for ‘facilitating the reporting process’
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using curation tools
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Editing audio on the go
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – analysing Twitter accounts

The Associated Press (AP) is creating four regional investigative teams to support its staff across the US with “reporting and presentation resources”, in particular by using journalists with expertise in computer-assisted reporting (CAR), Flash interactives and access to public records.

Now, any reporter in a region who has an idea for a story that requires high-level data analysis will have a partner. If an editor has an idea for a project that lends itself to an interactive map or another data-driven multimedia project, they can work with the team. When a big, breaking story happens anywhere in the country, we’ll tap the region’s I-team [the name given to the newly created teams] to begin digging into public records and inspection reports while the story is still developing, not days after the fact.

Full story at this link…

• KCNN: ‘Citizen Journalists’ Guide to Open Government’
• ‘If you could see my desk, you’d weep’: Santa Fe reporter trawls data for wealth story
• #newsrw: Heather Brooke – ‘How do any journalists in the UK do their job?’
• Chris Amico: Lessons in data journalism and ‘frameworks for reporting’
• David Higgerson: ‘Actionable’ news and what it means for data journalism

Last Friday’s London-based Hacks and Hacker’s Day, run by ScraperWiki (a new data tool set to launch in beta soon), provided some excellent inspiration for journalists and developers alike.

In groups, the programmers and journalists paired up to combine journalistic and data knowledge, resulting in some innovative projects: a visualisation showing the average profile of Conservative candidates standing in safe seats for the General Election (the winning project); graphics showing the most common words used for each horoscope sign; and an attempt to tackle the various formats used by data.gov.uk.

One of the projects, ‘They Write For You’ was an attempt to illustrate the political mix of articles by MPs for British newspapers and broadcasters. Using byline data combined with MP name data, the journalists and developers created this pretty mashup, which can be viewed at this link.

The team took the 2008-2010 data from Journalisted and used ScraperWiki, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to create the visualisation: each newspaper shows a byline breakdown by party. By hovering over a coloured box, users can see which MPs wrote for which newspaper over the same two year period.

The exact statistics, however, should be treated with some caution, as the information has not yet been cross-checked with other data sets.  It would appear, for example, that the Guardian newspaper published more stories by MPs than any other title, but this could be that Journalisted holds more information about the Guardian than its counterparts.

While this analysis is not yet ready to be transformed into a news story, it shows the potential for employing data skills to identify media and political trends.

• RBI to host hacks/hackers day in November
• PDA: Journalists and developers join forces for Guardian Hack Day 2
• ‘You can’t give a machine data and get journalism out the other end’
• #media140 – Impure visual data tool to tell the story
• Hacks and Hackers look at health, education and leisure

Had it not been published at the end of the workday on a Friday, Journalism.co.uk would have made a bit more of a song-and-dance of this story, but as a result it instead it got reduced to a quick blog post. In short: OU academic Tony Hirst produced a rather lovely map, on the suggestion (taunt?) of the Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, and the result? A brand new politics story for the Guardian on MPs’ expenses.

Computer-assisted reporting (CAR) is nothing new, but innovations such as the Guardian’s launch of Open Platform, are leading to new relationships and conversations between data/stats experts, programmers and developers, (including the rarer breed of information architects), designers, and journalists – bringing with them new opportunities, but also new questions. Some that immediately spring to mind:

• How do both parties (data and interactive gurus and the journalists) benefit?

• Who should get credit for new news stories produced, and how should developers be rewarded?

• Will newsrooms invest in training journalists to understand and present data better?

• What problems are presented by non-journalists playing with data, if any?

• What other questions should we be asking?

The hashtag #datajourn seems a good one with which to kickstart this discussion on Twitter (Using #CAR, for example, could lead to confusion…).

So, to get us started, two offerings coming your way in #datajourn part 2 and 3.

• Q&A with the man who inspired this post – Tony Hirst himself
• The beginnings of a list of links to relevant articles recently hosted on Journalism.co.uk and elsewhere.

Please add your thoughts below the posts, and get in touch with judith@journalism.co.uk (@jtownend on Twitter) with your own ideas and suggestions for ways Journalism.co.uk can report, participate in, and debate the use of CAR and data tools for good quality and ethical journalism.

• OUseful: Gripes with Guardian’s DataStore #datajourn
• MPs’ travel expenses disparity highlighted by Guardian Open Platform projects
• #DataJourn part 3: Useful and recent links looking at use of data in journalism
• #FollowJourn: @psychemedia/lecturer and blogger
• OUseful: New public data Q&A site launches

The digital revolution could help halt the decline in investigative journalism, thanks to a “new academic and professional discipline” known as ‘computational journalism’, writes John Mecklin in Miller-McCune.

“On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not pay anything like the whole freight for investigative reporting. But [James] Hamilton [director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University] thinks advances in computing can alter the economic equation, supplementing and, in some cases, even substituting for the slow, expensive and eccentric humans required to produce in-depth journalism as we’ve known it.”

• PDA: ‘Algorithms will replace journalists’
• Audio: Paul Foot Award winner Ian Cobain on investigative journalism
• NewsTilt: What went wrong
• Independent.co.uk: Why the award-winning Salford Star went online-only
• #Followjourn @newsmary /journalist

Earlier in the week we blogged that the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer (GIJC) had received a little criticism for being a bit 1.0 in its coverage.  But if its partcipants made limited use of the social web to report live from the event, the Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) contingent was out in force and here’s what they had to say.

Paul Myers, a BBC specialist in internet research, and web trainer, told Journalism.co.uk how slow CAR is in the UK.  “People pick up on the flashy stuff like Google maps, but not CAR,” Myers said.

“This is quite typical in my experience – lots of resistance when I started training journalists in using the internet at BBC in the early 90s. It has been uphill struggle to convince people to use the web,” he told us.

In an opening session, the director of computer-assisted reporting at ProPublica, Jennifer LaFleur, urged people not to be deterred by how complicated it sounds.  “Computer assisted reporting (CAR) is doing stories based on data analysis, but it’s really just working with public records,” she said.

“Don’t get intimidated by the statistics, maths or excel and access focus: these are just the tools we use to report with.”

Along with database editor Helena Bengtsson, from Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT, LaFleur highlighted several recent successful news stories that had been unearthed by using CAR.

One, an investigation into the voting patterns of Swedish EU-parliamentarians, showed that several of the most high-profile parlimentarians abstained in 50 per cent or more of cases, causing political outcry.

But, maybe journalists should leave the more high powered CAR to the IT people? No, was the blunt answer to that audience question. CAR should be par for the course, said LaFleur. “90 per cent of stories we presented here were done with Access and Excel. I am a journalist doing journalism,” she said.

“You have to interview the data as you interview a person,’ added Helena Bengtsson. “When I do a query on data… I’m asking the data as a journalist.

“There is a lot of information in the data that IT-people wouldn’t have discovered. We’re journos first, data-specialists second,” Bengtsson said.

GCIJ Lillehammer also ran classes on RSS, scraping the web, being an online ‘bloodhound’ and effective web searching.

“There are two reasons for that: we have the training expertise and see major need for training in web research and computer assisted reporting”,  Haakon Hagsbö, from SKUP (a Norwegian foundation for investigative journalism) and one of the organisers of GIJC  Lillehammer, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It has certainly been very popular at earlier conferences. People don’t know what they don’t know until they attend the training. It’s a real eyeopener, but they soon find that it’s not rocket science, as these are simple yet powerful tools. We see more and more examples of colleagues from all over the world who meet online and use the web for research.

In reponse to Isaac Mao’s comment that there had been a low take-up of live social media reporting from the conference, Haugsbö said: “We have streamed everything live online, but other than that I don’t have a good answer to this.”

• ReadWriteWeb: Journalism needs data
• Editor&Publisher: New AP regional investigative teams will boost CAR and data journalism
• CIJ creates new online tools for investigative journalists
• #DataJourn part 1: a new conversation (please re-tweet)
• Media Release: Dow Jones grants $515,000 in newspaper fund