Tag Archives: texas tribune

Five great examples of data journalism using Google Fusion Tables

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Google Fusion Tables allows you to create data visualisations including maps, graphs and timelines. It is currently in beta but is already being used by many journalists, including some from key news sites leading the way in data journalism.

To find out how to get started in data journalism using Google Fusion Tables click here.

Below are screengrabs of the various visualisations but click through to the stories to interact and get a real feel for why they are great examples of data journalism.

1. The Guardian: WikiLeaks Iraq war logs – every death mapped
What? A map with the location of every death in Iraq plotted as a datapoint.
Why? Impact. You must click the screen grab to link to the full visualisation and get the full scale of the story.

2. The Guardian: WikiLeaks embassy cables
What? This is a nifty storyline visualisation showing the cables sent in the weeks around 9/11.
Why? It’s a fantastic way of understanding the chronology.

3. The Telegraph: AV referendum – What if a general election were held today under AV?
What? A visual picture of using the hypothetical scenario of the outcomes of the 2010 general election if it had been held under the alternative vote system.
Why? A clear picture by area of the main beneficiaries. See how many areas are yellow.

4. WNYC: Mapping the storm clean-up
What? A crowdsourced project which asked a radio station’s listeners to text in details of the progress of a snow clean-up.  The datapoints show which streets have been ploughed and which have not. There are three maps to show the progress of the snow ploughs over three days.
Why? As it uses crowsourced information. Remember this one next winter.

5. Texas Tribune: Census 2010 interactive map – Texas population by race, hispanic origin
What? The Texas Tribune is no stranger to Google Fusion Tables. This is map showing how many people of hispanic origin live in various counties in Texas.
Why? A nice use of an intensity map and a great use of census data.

You can find out much more about data journalism at news:rewired – noise to signal, an event held at Thomson Reuters, London on Friday 27 May.

CJR and the Texas Tribune: Is data both journalism and a business?

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The Columbia Journalism Review takes an in-depth look at news start-up the Texas Tribune, which launched in November last year “billing itself not only as an antidote to the dwindling capitol press corps but also as a new force in Texas political life”. CJR considers how sustainable the venture is editorially and commercially:

The Tribune’s biggest magnet by far has been its more than three dozen interactive databases, which collectively have drawn three times as many page views as the site’s stories (…) The Tribune publishes or updates at least one database per week, and readers e-mail these database links to each other or share them on Facebook, scouring their neighborhood’s school rankings or their state rep’s spending habits. Through May, the databases had generated more than 2.3 million page views since the site’s launch

Full story on CJR…

Non-profit Texas Tribune launches

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“[I]f our nerves are shot, we’re excited, elated, enthralled (…) For those of us who willingly quit good jobs with big media companies to join an untried journalism start-up with an untested business model, this site, this thing, is the expression of our ideals, the realization of our dreams, and the validation of our faith,” said the editor-of-chief of the new non-profit Texas Tribune upon launching yesterday:

“What we intend to accomplish with the Trib – what we mean to do on an ongoing basis – is right there in our stated mission: to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern,” wrote Evan Smith:

“We’ll do this through our original reporting, published on this site and in the pages of and on the web sites of our syndication partners, and our various on-the-record events, which will always be open to the public: an annual ideas festival, a weekly conversation series, a college tour, and the like. In true twenty-first-century fashion, we’re approaching the task of storytelling across multiple platforms: text, audio, video, blogs, databases, mobile, social.

“We’re treating you, the reader or viewer or listener or user, as if you’re the customer, and we’re busily puzzling through how best to meet your various demands. Our goal is to maximize your ability to personalize your experience; as we move to day five and day ten and day thirty, we’ll be adding new and innovative ways to do just that.”

Full post at this link…

The publication has also produced this YouTube video: