News Reporting and Public Records

Ok, actually it’s not from the White House, but from a watchdog group Propublica. The organization has set up ChangeTracker to track when the White House changes its online content, along with two government-developed web sites recovery.gov and financial stability.gov.

The non-White House site are set up to monitor the economic recovery package (hopefully!). The site also gives directions to set up your own trackers.

Propublica.org is a nonprofit group dealing with topical issues in the public interest.

Former UF student and Fact Finder Megan Taylor tipped me off to this intriguing new opportunity that combines scholarly and applied research techniques on never-been-available datasets–both domestic and international.

Now, before your eyes glaze over with that “oh no, not a scholarly post” scorn, hear me out.

The Digging into Data Challenge is a competitive grant opportunity where researchers are invited to develop, test and showcase ideas employing some of the massive datasets available in the Internet Age. In effect, they’re willing to pay you to come up with an innovative way to mine data.

From my vantage point, the more innovative, the better. And as further enticement, the agencies are offering access to data collections that generally have had no public access, such as university libraries, the Great War Primary Documents Archive, and, my personal favorite, the Wayback Machine.

The goals of the initiative are

* to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis;
* to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis;
* to promote international collaboration; and
* to work with data repositories that hold large digital collections to ensure efficient access to these materials for research.

The “they” sponsoring the competition are: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada. The only major requirement hiccup is thatresearchers from at least two countries must be involved. But that seems doable.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think this opportunity is something that my current fact finders should be thinking about. This is a pretty tall order for even the most advanced researcher. However, it’s certainly something to strive for, if computer-assisted reporting, data mining and research is what gets the blood pumping.

As a hard-core absolutist in terms of press freedoms and public access, I find it heartening that one of the first actions taken by President Barack Obama was directed in that realm. In a memo sent out all federal executive departments on Jan. 21, Obama directed each department to open up records to public access and operate with more transparency.

This comes from the Quoted from the memorandum:

Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government. Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.

While few specifics in terms of what access will be available, this philosophy is certainly positive and laudable. I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which is certainly a peer school to UF in terms of journalism, has revamped its curriculum to be more multi-media oriented.

As part of this revamp, the school has begun a class called “Public Affairs Reporting For New Media.” As near as I can tell, students in the course pick a topic for the semester and do some in-depth research, including multi-media elements, to develop a package.

It appears to be a hybrid in some ways of our Applied Fact Finding and Public Affairs Reporting with some multi-platform elements thrown in. Regardless, it sounds intriguing and the professor of the class is blogging about his experience. I think I’ll be a regular reader to see how it turns out.

The campus is buzzing here at the University of Florida, though I feel certain it’s more about the upcoming National Championship game than the first day of the spring semester.

Nevertheless, I always like to start out the semester with an example of computer-assisted reporting for my students, so I found one that relates to student athletes. USA Today examined the majors of university athletes at 142 schools to determine if athletes flock to certain majors. Turns out, they do, and that major isn’t often journalism.

What I find especially interesting is the lengths that the paper goes to in an attempt to get a fairly diverse sample, across sports. It would be interesting to extend this beyond the nation’s largest schools, but it is a fascinating look, with some statistical heft to it.

I’ve been reading a lot about the social media service Twitter. Personally, I’ve been a bit reluctant to embrace this idea, but certainly it appears that lots of folks are on board with it.

Essentially, an individual signs up to follow certain tweets (perhaps from other journalists or sources). Then, whenever the followers update their tweets, it comes to your phone or cue. It’s a way of tracking individuals and the character limit is 140 per message.

From an information-gathering standpoint, I think it’s useful in that if you follow the right people, you’ll get some good info. However, if I’m a reporter, I’m not planning to share my scoops in little tweets. But maybe that’s just me.

Basically, I’m trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, check out this post about how journalists can use Twitter and draw your own conclusions.

In honor of election day, I thought I’d highlight a few election-related graphics that provide some useful information.

Time Magazine: nice stand-alone graphic on swing-votes.

Wall Street Journal: Audio commentary with hypothetical electoral college scenarios.

USA Today: This is kind of a build-your-own-candidate graphic.

And finally….a height and weight comparison from the New York Times.

As always, go vote!

I have created a page (on your right) and put all of my previous podcasts about news research on it–take a listen….

The Public Records Free Directory Blog now includes a post about obtaining military records that should be useful for Fact Finding students.

In particular, the post talks about the DD214, which designates individual military service. This form, as with most military records, is not available online and can be requested here.

Military records are one of the last frontiers of information not online, but they are still key documents for information gathering.

My class had a visit this week from one of the best in the CAR business–Matt Waite, News Technologist at the St. Petersburg Times. Matt talked to a couple of classes at UF about using data in news stories and how to approach the main concepts.

But it was interesting, really.

My colleague, Mindy McAdams, posted two blog entries about his visit to her online media class, and I thought they were worth sharing as well. The first was entitled Why You Should Learn to Love Data (which everyone should!) and the second was When to Choose Data over Stories. Both hit some great examples of how and why to use data in stories without losing the storytelling aspect of news.

The goal, of course, is to to employ data to enhance a story and provide information in a user-friendly manner.

I also want to put a plug in for this site, as a tutorial for many basic web applications used in journalism. One of the challenges of determining content for Fact Finding is that it’s required for all journalism majors at UF. While that’s a good thing, it means that students have a range of interests and abilities when they walk in the door. So, while some may want additional CAR/data instruction, others have no interest or ability in either area.

So, for those interested in learning more about many of the applications used by our *news techologists* across the globe, the Reporter’s Cookbook is a great place to start.