Another unique investigation by The New York Times gets A1 play in this Sunday's edition (1 Oct. 2006) under the hed “Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings.”  Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts (who probably did the heavy lifting on the data analysis) took a long-term look at who contributed to the campaigns of Ohio's Supreme Court justices.  It ain't a pretty picture if one believes the justices should be above lining their own pockets, whether it's a campaign fund or otherwise.

In any event, there seems to be a clear correlation between contributions — and the sources — and the outcome to too many cases.  A sidebar, “Case Studies: West Virginia and Illinois,” would suggest there is much to be harvested by reporters in other states.

There is, thankfully, a fine description of how the data for the study was collected and analyzed.  See “How Information Was Collected“

There are two accompanying infographics, one  (“Ruling on Contributors' Cases” ) is much more informative than the other (“While the Case Is Being Heard, Money Rolls In” ), which is a good, but confusing, attempt to illustrate difficult concepts and relationships. 

At the end of the day, though, we are grateful for the investigation, data crunching and stories.

One of the major aspects of the Digital Revolution that has long intrigued us is how it is driving a shift in power away from institutions and people of traditional authortiy to the individual. 

A great example of how this is happening was reported in today's (1 Oct. 2006) NYTimes.  “A Town’s Architectural Shift, Chronicled Online” was started by Montclair, New Jersey resident Liz George.  She is  managing editor of Baristanet, a community Web site and forum, added an
interactive map to the site to keep a record of teardowns in her town.  The NYT reports:

“On Sept. 22, the Web site started a new feature to chart the town’s
changing architectural landscape — an interactive map that shows
teardowns, homes with historic designations and recent construction.

“'Maybe
something like this will give people pause,' said Ms. George, 39, in
her office at her gracious 100-year-old home. 'Knowing you’re having
your house on the teardown map, knowing it will be part of this trend,
I don’t think it has a positive implication.'

'The teardown
issue has taken on a sense of urgency here after a developer bought the
blue-shuttered Colonial-style house, on North Mountain Avenue, for
$870,000 last fall and demolished it this summer with plans to build
six town homes. The action led town officials to rezone about 200 lots
— including the North Mountain Avenue property — from a designation
that allows up to eight units on a single lot to a designation that
allows only two. The developer has since dropped his plans and has put
the empty lot up for sale.

Of course, a newspaper could have done the same thing, but so far as we know, none has.  So the least the industry could do is supply the software apps, and maybe some instruction, to let citizens build their local databases.

We're a bit delayed in learning about this post on
PJNet Today
(“A Public Journalism Network Weblog by Leonard Witt and Colleagues),  but Jan Schaffer's remarks certainly are in line with what the IAJ is learning as we dive into the analysis of last fall's online survey (in five languages) of journalism educators. 

“September 13, 2006

Jan Schaffer Critiques Journalism Education

Jan Schaffer, director of the J-Lab at the University of Maryland,
recently took a few pokes at the way journalism is taught.

Here are the key parts of a just-posted talk she gave at the AEJMC
entitled: What's Next for Newspapers and Journalism
Education?

I read several newspapers a day now. I
read them now first as a citizen, second as an old Type A assigning editor. So
often, I find myself unsatisfied with the stories and angry at the coverage.

I worry about the CONVENTIONS of
journalism that we are teaching our students. I worry that some of the
conventions that were used both to define “news” and to safeguard
fairness and balance in journalism are being gamed by media strategists for
their own ends. The result is a journalism that is not serving the public well
– and that the public doesn't much trust.

She adds:

I think the academy itself needs to create some oxygen for
entrepreneurship and innovation in journalism. We need to rethink our RECRUITING. We reward long-time professionals, who often
don't have the skills to bridge the new media environment. Indeed, one of Maryland's
marquee professors doesn't even do e-mail. When I suggested this year that all
professors be required to put their course syllabi online, I was told it was
not the kind of thing that the school could require and besides a lot of people
wouldn't know how to do it.

We reward long-form storytellers and feature
writing, even though a lot of newspapers and even magazines don't run long
stories or features. We reward Ph.D.'s when often their research is not very
relevant to the future of journalism – and in many cases, in my view, doesn't
really add a lot of value to the knowledge base of journalism.

A interesting mapping project today from Abuquerque's DWI Resource Center.  A map showing a surprising clustering of the city's DWI-related events.  Wouldn't it again be an interesting reporting tool — and a draw for readers — if a newspaper were to create a dynamic and regularly updated map of this sort for its market area?

Bernalillo County (New Mexico) DWI Crash Map
http://www.dwiresourcecenter.org/crashmap.shtml

The Bernalillo County DWI Crash Map is a new tool to help citizens
avoid drunk drivers by assisting them in locating the more dangerous
roadways
in and around Albuquerque and allowing them to plan alterative
commuting routes and times. The DWI Crash Map indicates locations
around the county
with the highest incidents of alcohol-related crashes, and the areas in
the county with the highest concentrations of alcohol establishments.
The map
also contains charts showing alcohol-related crashes and DWI arrests by
time of day.

Although a citizen's best defense against a drunk driver is to
always wear a seat-belt and drive defensively, this map can assist you
in
planning your daily commute to avoid high-risk intersections and times
of day when alcohol-related crashes are most likely to occur.

To view the map, you will a need free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Here's another example of how most any newspaper could (a) create a database helpful to reporters and (b) generate revenue for the organization.  Not much, perhaps, but revenue.

Earlier this week, BT (formerly British Telecom) announced that it was partnering with Ancestry.co.uk to post “more than a century of its telephone books” online.  This will be of special interest to geneological researchers, of course, but surely reporters would find it a helpful tool to research individuals or companies.  To the extent that street addresses are available, this is also a potentially rich source of GIS data for historical mapping.

And here's the revenue connection:  “Publishing the BT Phone Books Archive, which is most complete set of
phone directories in existence, represents a coup for Ancestry.co.uk
who are establishing themselves as a leading proponent of family and
social history research on the internet.”  A subscription to Ancestory.com (though it is not easy to find the cost) is £69.95 (US$132) per year.  Surely, BT is going to get a cut of the phonebook-specific searches.

Obviously, all newspapers could do something similar.

Friend Laura Soto-Bara posts the following to the NewsLib listserv:

Any discipline always has subsets of argument, typically about definitions, methodologies, process or significance.  Statistics, of course, is no different.  Below is an interesting article from the Washington Monthly about what constitutes statistical significance.  The article is OK, but the commentary below it even better.  See http://www.blogware.com/admin/index.cgi/cmd=post_article

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND….Via Kieran Healy, here's something way off the beaten path: a new paper by Alan Gerber and Neil Malhotra titled “Can political science literatures be believed? A study of publication bias in the APSR and the AJPS.”
It is, at first glance, just what it says it is: a study of publication
bias, the tendency of academic journals to publish studies that find
positive results but not to publish studies that fail to find results.
The reason this is a problem is that it makes positive results look
more positive than they really are. If two researchers do a study, and
one finds a significant result (say, tall people earn more money than
short people) while the other finds nothing, seeing both studies will
make you skeptical of the first paper's result. But if the only paper
you see is the first one, you'll probably think there's something to it.


The chart on the right shows G&M's basic result. In statistics
jargon, a significant result is anything with a “z-score” higher than
1.96, and if journals accepted articles based solely on the quality of
the work, with no regard to z-scores, you'd expect the z-score of
studies to resemble a bell curve. But that's not what Gerber and
Malhotra found. Abovebelow
a z-score of 1.96 there are far fewer studies than you'd expect.
Apparently, studies that fail to show significant results have a hard
time getting published.

Eight or nine years back we attended one of the first Crime Mapping conferences sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and found it to be one of the most creative and practical events of this type.  (We also have very high regard for the ESRI Users Conference and the Special Libraries Assoc. meetings.)  So we want to be sure to let all analytic journos know about next year's Crime Mapping confab, scheduled for March 28 to 31, 2007 in Pittsburg, Penn.  Here's part of the official call for papers:

The Mapping & Analysis for Public Safety Program announces it's Call 
for Papers for the Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference in Pittsburgh, 
PA at the Omni William Penn Hotel, March 28 to 31, 2007.  The deadline 
for submission is Friday, September 29th....
    
The theme of this conference will be Spatial Approaches to 
Understanding Crime & Demographics.  The use of Geographic Information Systems 
(GIS) and spatial data analysis techniques have become prominent tools for 
analyzing criminal behavior and the impacts of the criminal justice 
system on society.   Classical and spatial statistics have been merged to 
form more comprehensive approaches in understanding social problems 
from research and practical standpoints.  These methods allow for the 
measurement of proximity effects on places by neighboring areas that lead 
to a multi-dimensional and less static understanding of factors that 
contribute to or repel crime across space.

The 9th Crime Mapping Research Conference will be about demonstrating 
the use and development of methodologies for practitioners and 
researchers.  The MAPS Program is anticipating the selection of key accepted 
presentations for further development of an electronic monograph on GIS, 
Spatial Data Analysis and the Study of Crime in the following year.  Its 
purpose will be to demonstrate the fusing of classical and spatial 
analysis techniques to enhance policy decisions.  Methods should not be 
limited to the use of classical and spatial statistics but also 
demonstrate the unique capabilities of GIS in preparing, categorizing and 
visualization data for analysis....

For more, see: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/

If
you want to generate a glazed look of incomprehension in a audience of
journalists, just ask, “How many of you work for an organization that
has someone assigned to coordinate knowledge management throughout the
company or at least for the newsroom?”  

We're not talking
about someone who acquires and coordinates databases, a task typically
assigned to news researchers, but rather someone who studies what
digital (or potentially digital ) data resources exist within the
entire company and how might those be leveraged to generate new or
better insights, stories and, possibly, revenue streams.

The
first journalism-specific book on the topic came of Stephen Quinn, a
professor at Deakin University in Australia.  Quinn's book, “Knowledge Management in the Digital Newsroom,”
appeared in 2002 and draws examples from many U.S., European and Australian publications. 

Now comes a similar work by a team led by Prof. Guy Berger that studied African newspapers of varying size and sophistication.

Author/s: Weza et al.
Date Published: 31/08/2006
File:
download (1554.115 KB)

Description:
This book tracks the state-of-play in a selection of independent
African newspapers, both big and small. It also points the way forward,
with explanations of “convergence”, “content management”, and
“enterprise management”. In short, it shows what theories and systems
of Knowledge Management can offer the African media.
For other titles, see: http://www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za/publications.cfm

We will be
posting a review in coming days, but until then, go to the link above
and download a copy for yourself.  The download price is right — free
— and doing so will save the mailing costs from Grahamstown, South
Africa.

The 2006 Knight-Batten Awards given by J-Lab are out.  All are worth looking at, but one caught our eye, one of the “Niche News” awards in the “Notable Entries” category.  Clearly, a lot of legwork on the streets of Boston went into this well-designed project.  Now the only question is: Who will keep it updated and how?

bostonchinatown.org
Emerson College
Journalism (Boston, MA)

“Quintessential visualization of civic mapping … Tell us more about these people.” -2006 Knight-Batten Advisory Board Judges Sixteen Emerson journalism graduate students put in a combined 500 hours of original reporting to develop this web chart. The chart displays connections between more than 100 newsmakers, organization leaders and activists in Boston’s Chinatown based on who talks with whom about local news. The map also acts as a directory with personal profiles available to help people connect.