Category Archives: propublica

ProPublica: How You Can Use Our ‘Opportunity Gap’ Project in Your Reporting

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"Our news application makes it easy to point readers to profiles of specific schools or districts. Here’s our guide on how to use it, including instructions on how to share your findings from within the app and how to embed a special link to it in your story. ... We’ve created special Facebook buttons all over our schools database. Use them to log in and share your observations and comments on school and district comparisons. Just fill out the 'share' box on the left and click 'post.'"

New York Times: Alaska to Release Sarah Palin’s E-Mails

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"The news media have descended here en masse to sift through the trove, with many organizations sending teams of reporters and database specialists to comb the documents and post them online. ... some news organizations are setting up elaborate systems for scanning them and inviting the public to help search them online. MSNBC.com, ProPublica and Mother Jones magazine are working with a research company to create an online database of the documents. ... The New York Times and other news organizations intend to assemble their own searchable online databases of the documents, and some, including The Times, were asking readers Thursday to help reporters sift through the voluminous correspondence in the coming days. "

@innovations: Washington Post on news innovation, Moving away from Flash: A look at JavaScript drawing libraries

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"Last week we published a graphic that compared four federal budget proposals through a series of charts. We used the jQuery library Flot to draw simple, interactive line charts that showed how the debt and deficit would change under the different plans. Flot is very easy to use, flexible and customizable, and is one of many free-to-use JavaScript graphing libraries out there (Dracula, Highcharts and RGraph are a few others). "

ProPublica: Reporting Recipe: Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for Data Projects

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Amanda Michel: "we began experimenting with mTurk last spring to clean, de-duplicate and reformat data. We’ve since used the tool to collect or proof more than 28,000 data points, from the names of companies that received stimulus money [6] to the categorization of answers to our home loan modification questionnaire [7]. We’re impressed with the speed and accuracy of its results. For example, a project we estimated would take a full-time staffer almost three days to finish was completed on mTurk overnight for $37, with 99 percent accuracy."

MediaShift: ProPublica’s ChangeTracker Lets You Watch Government’s Moves | PBS

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"ChangeTracker is a project at ProPublica that watches three government websites -- Whitehouse.gov, Recovery.gov and Financialstability.gov -- for edits, deletions or changes to existing content. Through an RSS feed, Twitter account or daily email digest, ChangeTracker will inform you when a page changes on these sites, and show you what's been added or removed."

ProPublica: Steal Our Code: How to Build Your Own Change-Tracking Feeds

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"ChangeTracker is an experimental new tool that watches pages on whitehouse.gov. recovery.gov, and financialstability.gov so you don't have to. .... But ChangeTracker is not a piece of software. It's the output of a series of powerful and mostly free Web-based tools, lovingly connected over the Internet. Here's how to do it yourself so you can track changes on any Web site on the Internets."

Nieman Journalism Lab: ProPublica and NYT seek $1M to put everyone’s documents online

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"Two of the biggest names in journalism have applied to this year’s Knight News Challenge: The pioneering investigative-reporting non-profit ProPublica and The New York Times are seeking $1 million from the Knight Foundation to launch an online repository of primary-source documents."