Tag Archives: senate

Bill Grueskin: ‘What would Google do about newspapers?’

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Guest blogging on Reflections of a Newsosaur, Bill Grueskin, the academic dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University and former managing editor of WSJ.Com, offers his translation of comments by the Google’s vice-president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, to the Senate commerce subcommittee hearing.

“Her elliptical comments at a congressional hearing on the sorry state of the newspaper industry revolved around a message that seemed to add up to: ‘Lotsa luck, fellas.'”

Full post at this link…

ProPublica’s ‘Shovelwatch’: reviewing Obama’s stimulus package

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Not-for-profit news organisation ProPublica has crated a site dedicated to analysis of President Obama’s stimulus package for the US economy.

Working with news program The Takeaway and public radio station WNYC, ShovelWatch is big on data and data visualisation.

For starters:

A searchable, visual representation of the senate and state’s spending plans for the stimulus bill – created using IBM’s Many Eyes (also used by the New York Times):

Screenshot of Shovelwatch visualisation

A fully searchable database of ‘How Much Your School District Stands to Lose in Stimulus Bill Construction Funds’.

The site will continue to develop – perhaps deploying the skills of new intern programmer-journalist Brian Boyer – and, in a press release, said it will later look to citizen’s help track how the plan is working/not working.

Washington Post using Apture for article links

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The Washington Post has teamed up with Apture to add embedded links into its news articles. Washington Post articles, video content and Google maps will be linked to using the technology, which, according to a press release, requires only a single line of code to make the links appear.

Information from WaPo’s Congressional Votes Database will be linked to congress and senate members’ names when they appear in articles, as part of the new design.

WaPo content will now be available to other media and political sites that sign up to Apture. Articles already allow readers to view who’s linking to that content in the blogosphere.

Apture’s technology has previously been used by BBC News as part of its inline links trial and its use by WaPo follows the launch of the New York Times’ link aggregation service TimesExtra last week.