SubscribeA lesson from Patchwork Nation: Frameworks for Reporting
July 28, 2009 at 9:46 p.m.
In programming, frameworks help speed development by abstracting common tasks and letting us focus on things that matter. They make what's important interesting.
We can apply this approach to reporting as well, especially when we're collecting structured data and treating news as data points. Doing this means we don't have to start over with each new set of figures.
A few lessons learned from Patchwork Nation and other projects.
Experts
January 28, 2009 at 9:09 a.m.
Steve Yelvington talks about being a local expert. This pushes farther a concept Jeff Jarvis advanced a few months back: The building block of journalism is no longer the article. Matt at Newsless describes this as systematic knowledge accumulation (he's talking about within journalism, in this case, but I think it's applicable here).
Let's think about what that might look like a bit. For a given topic or issue, I might want to pull together:
- News articles
- Blog posts
- Forum topics
- Links to other places talking about the issue
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Profiles of people who show up ...
The trouble with counting people in China
May 28, 2008 at 9:03 a.m.
A while back, I tried to answer a simple question people often asked me about Dalian: How many people live there?
Simple question, tough answer. Alex found a good dataset, which we put on DalianDalian. Well, the question has come back.
I'm writing a cover story on real estate in China's second-tier cities for an investment newsletter, and as part of the project, I've decided to compile a database of locales, most of which people outside of China have likely never heard (admittedly, there are some I couldn't have put on a map before starting this ...
