SubscribeLessons from Covering the Gulf Oil Leak
July 7, 2010 at 2:56 p.m.
Cross posted at MediaShift
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has lasted more than two months now. It is the worst spill in US history, and it is likely to continue until at least August. And in covering it, the NewsHour has broken every traffic record it ever had.
So, what have we learned here?
(Quick note: A lot of the thinking behind this post comes from a debriefing at work with my colleagues Vanessa Dennis, Travis Daub and Katie Kleinman, and from conversations about the spill and our coverage with other people in and out of the ...
Oil in the Gulf
May 24, 2010 at 11:12 a.m.
By now, I'm pretty sure anyone who reads this blog has seen the widget the PBS NewsHour launched a few weeks ago. Those ticking numbers have been embedded on dozens of websites, bringing thousands of new visitors our site.
So it's probably worth mentioning up front that at first, I thought building this thing was a bad idea. I thought it was gimmicky, and that it assigned specificity where there was none. I argued that any number we pick as the rate of spillage was almost guaranteed to be wrong, since the government, BP and outside experts were ...
Dual tracking
April 8, 2010 at 4:13 p.m.
Columbia University will soon offer a new dual masters degree in journalism and engineering, with the goal of cranking out more programmer-journalists, Wired reported yesterday.
This is good. It builds on the success of Medill's Knight-funded experiment offering scholarships to software developers to learn journalism. That's to be lauded.
But... (you knew there was a "but" coming)
Those getting dual degrees shouldn't be the only journalists hanging out with computer scientists. The problem isn't just a lack of reporters who can code, but a shortage of people in the newsroom who know what's possible.
I ...
We Are What We've Built
March 21, 2010 at 2:59 p.m.
The Atlantic seems to be settling into its new site, despite a rocky relaunch. James Fallows is blogging again, and Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg are back to disagreeing over Israel and Palestine, instead of the nuances of web design and information architecture. As far as I can tell from the limited vantage point of my feed reader, things are getting back to normal.
But the brief turbulence that followed the relaunch of the rebuilt and redesigned site was interesting in the ways it failed. By most accounts, it did what it was meant to do: the diverse group of ...
Journalism to Django, Part Two: Required Reading
February 7, 2010 at 12:34 a.m.
So, you've gotten the hang of HTML and CSS. You can install Wordpress in five minutes, and you're comfortable mucking with templates. Or you get databases and it's time to get them on a web. Or you read my last post and feel ready for the next step.
Starting Points
At this point, take a look at the Django Book.
You can learn Django and Python at the same time (I did, as have others). But it is worth getting the hang of Python a bit first. Take some time and go through Think Python. It's ...
Why Django
January 12, 2010 at 10:37 p.m.
As of this month, I'll have been using Django for two years, and using it professionally for a year. That's a strange thing to think about, because I still have a hard time calling myself a "programmer" (though "web developer" feels easier, for some reason). I am, after all, a politics major with zero formal training in computer science. Yet here we are.
Over the past few months, friends have started asking me about my favorite framework: How'd I get started? Is it as good as the hype? Can I, or should I, learn it?
Well...
Why ...
Building a Better Ecosystem for Transparency
December 9, 2009 at 10:23 p.m.
Transparency is an ecosystem. Each part--government, journalists, activists--interact to create an environment where information flows, or doesn't. It's up to each part to ensure the continued growth of a healthy transparency ecosystem.
New tools for new news
December 30, 2008 at 3:28 a.m.
Journalists need new tools to work online. In the last year, I've used more that I can count, most of them free, to find and tell better stories on the Web.
Back in October, I started building an online database of such tools as a personal project, just a way to keep track of everything I was using. It has since grown into something I think others will find useful, so I'm releasing it into the wild.
Tools for News
The site is in public beta for now. Eventually, I hope to move it to its own domain ...
