Tag Archives: data

Guardian Politics: Second BNP membership leak expected

According to the Guardian, a new leaked list of British National Party members will be published by a website today.

The unnamed site insists the list, which includes names, addresses, postcodes and telephone numbers, is genuine and represents membership of the party as it stood in April this year.

The data leak would be the second in a year for the party after details of members were released online last November, raising debate about news organisations handling of the data and whether such documents should be linked to.

The party has suggested that the release of new information could be an attempt to undermine the appearance of its leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s Question Time programme this week. Download PERISCOPE PORN free now

Full story at this link…

Online Journalism Blog: Can the UK government save journalism?

Paul Bradshaw suggests a number of steps (with examples) that the government could take ‘to create an environment that supports good journalism’:

  • Release of public data
  • Tax relief on donations to support investigative journalism
  • Encouraging innovation and enterprise
  • Reskilling of redundant journalists
  • An effective local news consortia

Well worth a read – and more suggestions are welcome.

Full post at this link…

Malcolm Coles: MPs’ expenses – the best of the web

It’s fair to say Journalism.co.uk is interested in the media’s coverage of the recent UK MPs’ expenses scandal, so before we start rivalling the number of Telegraph pages published on the subject, here’s a round-up by Malcolm Coles of the best source data, visualisations, analysis and reportage.

A great guide for data-based storytelling too.

Meanwhile, on the front page of today’s Guardian an update on the title’s own crowdsourcing MPs’ expenses project – as reported by Journalism.co.uk on Thursday: almost 20,000 people have taken part and 160,000 pages examined.

Journalism.co.uk particularly liked this par from the Guardian’s report:

“All this will take much more careful analysis but shows the power of ‘citizen journalists’ and provides something of a riposte to one Telegraph commentator who dismissed the idea that a ‘collective of Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians’ could conduct ‘rigorous analysis necessary for the recent MPs’ expenses investigation’.”

ReadWriteWeb: CNET signs up for Open Calais

CNET.com will now share data from its technology reviews, news and blog posts on using Thomson Reuters’ Open Calais platform, allowing other publishers to use the information.

According to this report, CNET will publish certain sets of editorial data and some commercial information, for example data on its software download services, using the semantic API.

Signing up to OpenCalais will also enable CNET to generate topic pages.

Full story at this link…

Beet.TV: Why APIs are essential – CurrentTV’s Robin Sloan

Good explanation of APIs and how they can be used by third-party developers and as the foundations for media partnerships.

Trust your users and realise that they’re smarter than you think, adds CurrentTV’s Robin Sloan.

Full story at this link…

USTREAM.TV: Aron Pilhofer on the NYTimes’ databases and graphics

In an interview with Cindy Royal, associate professor at Texas State University, New York Times’ newsroom interactive technologies editor Aron Pilhofer discusses the Times’ graphics and data teams and being part of, what he describes as, one of the most collaborative newsrooms he’s worked in.

Video clips at Ustream

Full story at this link…

ProPublica launches ChangeTracker with help of journalist-programmer

Not-for-profit news organisation ProPublica is already making the most of new journalist-programmer intern Brian Boyer, who joined the site last month.

Boyer, who graduated from a specialist programming-journalism course at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, has created ChangeTracker – a tool to monitor changes made to WhiteHouse.gov, Recovery.gov and the upcoming FinancialStability.gov websites.

“ChangeTracker lets users see exactly what was removed, edited or updated on those sites by showing side-by-side comparisons of sites before and after changes made to them,” says a release from ProPublica.

What’s more you can get updates of the changes via RSS, Twitter, email or via the ChangeTracker webpage.

“ChangeTracker will help us keep an eye on the administration’s transparency pledges, and will help reporters, bloggers, government watchdogs and everyday citizens keep watch over the websites of their elected officials,” said Scott Klein, director of online development.

In true Boyer style, the programming behind the tool will be open source, much like his News Mixer application, for use by third-parties.

The organisation recently launched Shovelwatch – a site analysing President Obama’s stimulus package.

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

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.

ReadWriteWeb: NYTimes launches article API

Under the API the paper will offer 2.8 million articles – every article written since 1981 – with this updated every hour.

Other sites and developers can use the API, in particular by adding dynamic links to the articles or excerpts to their own pages, writes RWW.

Full story at this link…