Piton Data Lab

This report from the Knight Foundation looks at the business models of startup news organizations like MinnPost, Texas Tribune and Voice of San Diego:

…high-quality reporting alone will not create an organization that can sustain its ability to produce news in the public interest. 

Instead, successful news organizations – even the nonprofit ones  - have to act like digital businesses, making revenue experimentation, entrepreneurship and community engagement important pieces of the mix. Understanding how to create social and economic value and how to adapt and innovate are just as important as good content.

Collaborations such as Piton’s new data and storytelling projects, the Colorado Data Commons and the CitizenAtlas, are essential for sustaining investigative and watchdog journalism, according to an article at Poynter.

[The] Data Commons and CitizenAtlas both address the reality that there are many people who would like to access public information but don’t know how. “People want to dig up information themselves, and they want to know if it’s true or not,” Frank said by phone, noting that some government entities make it especially hard for people to find public data. “We can help them access information that actually gives them the answers to the questions they have.”

Paul Tough writes about grit and character education at two New York schools.

Chad Skelton of the Vancouver Sun created a series of tract-level maps using Google Fusion Tables and Canada census data from 2006.

Brian Boyer describes Knight News Challenge project PANDA at MediaShift Idea Lab - View the whole post

This forthcoming site from the Times (scheduled to launch September 7) has a focus on education news, data and information for parents:

“How can I find the best school for my child? Is my child’s school meeting my personal standards? And how can I hear from the experts, officials, principals, teachers and parents to understand the issues that affect my family?

SchoolBook, built on the highest journalistic standards of The New York Times and WNYC, will bring you:

• News, information and insider tips about schools in the five boroughs.
• Carefully chosen data and the tools to search and compare schools.
• Opportunities to hear from fellow parents, teachers and school principals.”

[via Nieman Journalism Lab]

“Following my previous post, a few folks had some questions on where to get started doing web development with a journalistic bent. So I thought I’d write down a few thoughts and give a basic roadmap of resources online and off that can help you get your feet wet.

The big problem with learning how to do this stuff is you need to know a little about a lot just to get a basic project off the ground. And not every tutorial tells you that you need to know X, Y and Z. Therefore, I’ll try to mention all the things you should get some basic reading up on.”

The ever-impressive Texas Tribune data team takes keywords from days of deliberation over the state budget and visualizes them with Highcharts.js. Nice work!

More on the entire legislative session here.

“While the dark days of journalism have receded a bit — it was only three years ago that layoffs were a weekly occurrence, and serious people discussed the closure of the New York Times — the business is still very much in a state of chaotic flux. The so-called war between new and old media rages on among the pundits, with Facebook supplanting Google News as the new bogeyman. But if you look past the hype, a bumper crop of new jobs and new ways of reporting have taken root, created by people who are willing to throw themselves into the breach and experiment. What follows is a list of 21 journalists and like-minded inventors who have created something exciting, interesting, and just plain cool. They’re crafting tools that fill the holes left open by the new/old media dichotomy. We call them innovators, but really they’re just finding the best ways to pursue their interests, while the rest of us get to benefit from their dedication — whether it’s news updates at the speed of light, precision-guided viral stories, or a return to “slow” reading.”

MediaStorm is kind of a big deal in the world of digital and multimedia storytelling.

They just welcomed Bruce Strong as a professional in residence.

“A video report on data visualization as a storytelling medium produced during a 2009-2010 Knight Journalism Fellowship.”

Paul Bradshaw visually (and alliteratively!) simplifies the workflow of data journalism nicely at Online Journalism Blog:

highcountrynews:

We just ran a piece on how well rural newspapers were doing as opposed to their urban counterparts (Pretty well!). We worked with Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West to create a visualization of how newspapers, rural and urban, have changed in number and distribution from 1690 to today. You can check out the interactive visualization on our site (sorry, the photo’s just a screen shot.)

The Opportunity Gap: Is your state providing equal access to education?

ProPublica just released a project analyzing educational opportunities - advanced math classes, AP courses, gifted and talented programs - for public schools across the country based on income level. In the accompanying story, they take a closer look at states with equal access across income levels, like Florida, and states with disparities, like Kansas.

An interactive tool lets you search for schools by geography and visually compare education opportunities. Here’s the Colorado explorer.

A very useful set of guides for working with Twitter

Welcome to #TfN. Inside, you’ll find resources to help you and your organization at every step of the reporting and publishing process.

http://media.twitter.com/newsrooms