The Dallas Morning News crew started publishing last weekend a terrific study of jury selection — or de-selection — in Dallas.  Check it out at

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/spe/2005/jury/



Striking Differences

Racial
discrimination in jury selection was a scourge on the Dallas
County district attorney's office for decades and was cited
recently by the U.S. Supreme Court as it overturned a 1986
death penalty case. The
Dallas Morning News spent two years gathering and analyzing
jury data from felony court trials to see what had changed.

Key Findings:
• Dallas County prosecutors excluded black jurors at more than twice the rate they rejected whites.
• Defense attorneys excluded whites at more than three times the rate they rejected blacks.
• Even
when blacks and whites gave similar answers to key questions asked by
prosecutors, blacks were excluded at higher rates.
• Blacks ultimately served on juries in numbers that mirror their
population primarily because of the dueling prosecution and defense
strategies.

Ford Fessenden, of the NYTimes, has yet another strong piece in Thursday's paper, “Health Mystery in New York: Heart Disease.”  The lede lays out the perplexing problem in NYC: “Death rates from heart disease in New York City and its suburbs are
among the highest recorded in the country, and no one quite knows why.”

But among possible answers — and here especially is where the AJ kicks in — is that there is some “…speculation that doctors in the area may lump deaths with more subtle
causes into the heart disease category, making that toll look worse
than it actually is.”  And “…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the health
department's request, has sent specialists to determine whether doctors
in New York City ascribe causes of death substantially differently.”


I know, I know, we're preaching here, but we don't think it can be pointed out too often: journalists and all social scientists cannot simply accept given numbers as a true, valid, honest.  We always have to swim up the data-creation stream to determine where, why and from who came the numbers. 

Tamara Thompson reports on her blog PI News Link….

“~ more government employees may be removed from public records ~

By Tamara Thompson Investigations

As Anna-Maria Mende reports from journalism.co.uk:

“US: News sites playing with Google Maps

By Anna-Maria Mende

Matt Waite, a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times,
is one of the bright lights in analytic journalism.  (And “bright”
has all the meanings you can apply.)  He is one of a handful of
the next generation, i.e. folks <40 years old, who are pushing some
intellectual and methodologtical boulders up the institutional hill
that is classic journalism. 



Matt has
created a non-rant blog describing his stories and projects in St.
Pete.  It's a learning resource.  See  www.mattwaite.com

Friend Barbara Semonche,
queen of the news research kingdom (queendom?) at the Univ. of North
Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications, posts these
always-pertinent observations today on the NewsLib listserv:



“Journalism/mass
comm students will be returning to colleges and universities within the
next week or two. Time to get fresh examples for these emerging
journalists about just what news researchers are capable of doing for
and with them.



       Here is what I'm seeking for our beginning and advanced reporting students.



 
     Current (within the last couple of years or so)
examples/strategies of the research methods and sources news librarians
used for both investigative projects and breaking stories. Here is what
I have now:



1. Kathy Hansen's and Nora Paul's recent book, “Behind the Message: Information strategies for Communicators,”
has a classic example of a 1994 Minneapolis Star-Tribune story by
reporter Tony Kennedy which was enhanced by not only his investigative
research, but supplemented by the efforts of the Star-Tribune's news
research team. The case study in the book reprinted Kennedy's article
on the privately-held Schwan Company and then detailed each fact with
what resources were discovered and used.  Interesting note: the
local public library and librarian proved to be a gold mine of
information for Kennedy as did local interviews with former Schwan
employees.



2.
Alison Head's (former head of research at The Press Democrat in Santa
Rosa, California) handout on the news research involved with a breaking
crime story. She took the text of reporter Tom Chorneau's 1995 article
and

then
highlighted all the resources used to get the data for the story. A
sort of “Anatomy of Crime Research.” [Note: please check this URL:

http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/head2.html ]



3. John
Martin's (St. Pete Times' researcher) 1998 description of how he worked
with a reporter on retrieving information on an alledged murderer's
identity on deadline. [Note: please check this URL: http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/stpete.html

The mission of the Annie E. Casey Foundation is “to
build better futures for disadvantaged children and their families in
the United States.”  One of the ways it does that is by packaging
data about America's children in a form that reporters can easily
access and use.  Hence, the “Kids Count State-Level Data Online”
site. 


“This new database, launched in July 2005,
contains more than 75 measures of child well-being, including the 10
measures used in our annual KIDS COUNT Data Book. It includes the most
timely data available on Education, Employment and Income, Poverty,
Health, Basic Demographics, and Youth Risk Factors for the U.S., all 50
states, and D.C. Depending on availability, three to five years of
trend data is currently available for most indicators.

“This
easy-to-use, powerful online database allows you to generate custom
reports for a geographic area (Profiles) or to compare geographic areas
on a topic (Ranking, Maps, and Line Graphs).“

From Directions Magazine:

“Machover Associates, a computer
graphics consultancy reports
that the worldwide market for scientific visualization in 2D and 3D
will grow from $10.7 billion in 2005 to $17.2 billion in 2010. The big
money is in 3-D imaging, the majority of which comes from private
industry. Still, a substantial amount of federal research funding is
available as well. Geospatial technologies have a role here: one
visualization film shown at Siggraph last week illustrated the 2002
Elbe River flooding and the use of geodata played in predicating the
need for evacuations.“

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

“Men and Women Seek Cartographic Intelligence Almost Equally

Men may not stop and ask, but according to a recent Hitwise study, 
49.1 percent of visitors to mapping Web sites were male for the
four-week period ending July 16, 2005.

 “Researching directions on the Web before a drive is a different
context than asking for directions once you're on the road and lost,”
said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Worldwide Research, Hitwise.
“However, the equal propensity of men to
use Internet mapping services represents not only an important
demographic attribute for marketers and mapping services, but insight
into the potential demand and adoption for mapping and driving
direction services”.

 More information for the week ending July 23, 2005 includes such thing as:

• 
  Yahoo! Maps and AOL's MapQuest dominate the online mapping category, with a combined category market share of 74.4 percent
  
• 
  Google Maps has become the third most popular map site since its launch
  in early 2005, and now claims 9.5 percent of visits to the category.  
• 
  Only 11.3 percent of Google Maps visitors departed directly for another map site, down from 17.6 percent in April 2005.
  
• 
  In the entire mapping category, 5.8 percent of visitors depart directly to a competing map site.
  
• 
  57 percent of visits to sites in the Travel/Maps category originated at a portal site or a search engine.
  
• 
  The term “mapquest” was the second most popular term (behind “ebay”)
  entered into all major Internet search engines (for the four weeks
  ending July 23, 2005.)
• 
  The term “maps” was number five and “driving directions” was number 18.
  
• 
  Visits to online map sites peak in the summer months, notes the report.
  The market share of visits to map sites increased 35 percent in June
  2004 versus December 2004. A category with a similar seasonal pattern
  is Travel/Destinations &
  Accommodation, which increased 95 percent in the same time period.
  Sites in this category include motels, amusement parks, and National
  Parks, which vacationers typically reach by car. 

From Journalism.co.uk….

Innovative software pinpoints news by location

Posted: 2 August 2005 By: Jemima Kiss

Email: jemima@journalism.co.uk

A UK firm has developed a free, innovative tool that plots breaking news by location.

To use NewsGlobe, web users must have Google Earth installed. More information is available on Daden's website.