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 ...
Footnotes on the State of the Union
January 28, 2010 at 10:51 p.m.
Last night the NewsHour went all-in covering State of the Union. We had on-air analysis, video from the Capitol and coverage on our new blog, and a new app to annotate the speech as it happened.
The Analyzer (I can never think of clever names for my apps; this is what everyone here calls it) is built in Django, with a lot of help from jQuery. From pitch to launch took exactly a week, including a working weekend.
The app is built around two main models: Speeches and footnotes. Every footnote is tied to a speech and indexed to a ...
Lessons from Gov2.0, and How I liveblogged it
September 19, 2009 at 11:51 a.m.
For three days last week, I attended the Gov2.0 Expo Showcase and Gov2.0 Summit, liveblogging the entire thing here and cross posting to Twitter. Between Tuesday and Thursday, I posted nine entries and 550 updates. After the conference, I dumped the entries and updates into one document, amounting to 66 printed pages and 19,815 words, plus another page of notes from the event's press conference and two video interviews with Tim O'Reilly and Santa Cruz's Peter Koht.
This was, in effect, just my usual notes, except more thorough and done entirely in public. Doing ...
Design inspiration: Lessons from nature
August 17, 2009 at 9:07 p.m.
From TED:
Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more. Here she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results.
More on Frameworks for Reporting: Lessons from PolitiFact
August 3, 2009 at 1:31 a.m.
The Obameter is a key example of reporting within a framework: Journalists advance a broad story update by update, building a comprehensive database of knowledge about one subject.
In this case, the PolitiFact team developed a standard to measure the success of Barack Obama's presidency. It's not, by any stretch, the only standard, but it gives us one clear lens to use in evaluating the president's effectiveness.
A 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.
Lessons from Spot.us
January 24, 2009 at 9:25 p.m.
I'm about to leave the warm embrace of the Bay Area and in doing so, take myself out of the jurisdiction of Spot.us. I was lucky enough to meet David Cohn when the San Jose Mercury News opened its newsroom for CopyCamp last year, and he suggested I pitch something in his alpha phase. At that point it was just a simple wiki, The Point and David's seemingly-infinite energy.
In December, when Spot.us launched officially with its new site and its own mechanisms for handling donations, my story was published and republished and spread farther than ...
