Posted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 8:01 p.m. by Chris Amico in Frameworks for Reporting , Projects and Thinking Out Loud about frameworks for reporting and patchwork nation
Talking to my colleague Dante Chinni today, he summed up my thinking on frameworks for reporting far better than I've been able to:
Without an organizing principal, all we're doing is throwing things out into the ether. It all becomes mush.
That's not an exact quote. We were in the middle of a long brainstorm and I wasn't keeping notes. But it's close enough.
Dante has been working on Patchwork Nation since its inception--it's all he does--and it shapes much of the way he looks at the news. It's his lens. When we talk about stories to write or data to gather, the questions we ask are focused on what an issue means in the communities we cover, how experiences across certain counties are similar, how others stand out.
None of this requires any particular technology. Patchwork Nation started on WordPress, with a Flash map that was essentially static and a little PHP script to track presidential candidates. Now it uses Wordpress MU, Django, Blogger, Flash and PHP, with added help from Google Maps and Charts.
Technology helps, but organizing principals and frameworks for reporting are platform neutral.
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